Hi. 



,:!if;'lii)!;f;tj)'*" 




GERMAN 
SUBMARINE WARFARE 



GERMAN 
SUBMARINE WARFARE 

A STUDY OF ITS METHODS AND SPIRIT 

INCLUDING 

THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

A RECORD OF OBSERVATIONS AND EVIDENCE 



BY 
WESLEY FROST 

TTNITED STATES CONSUL, FORMERLY STATIONED AT QTTEENSTOWN 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
FRANK LYON POLK 

COCBBELOB FOB TBB DEFABTMENT OF BTATS 




ILLUSTRATED 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK LONDON 

1918 






COPYBIQHT, 1918,"bT 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



DEC I 1 ISiS 



Printed in the United States of America 



IC1.A5085U4 



^ 



.V"! 



S^ 



s 



DEDICATED TO 
ROBERT P. SKINNER 

AMERICAN CONSUIrGENERAL AT LONDON 

MT CONSIDERATE SUPERIOR OFFICER AND HELPFUL MENTOR 
DURING QUEENSTOWN DAYS 



PKEFACE 

TTiTOEE the rules of ready writing I suppose an 
analysis of German submarine methods should com- 
mence with some ghastly and gripping incident. 
But, with the reader's favor, I desire expressly to 
avoid that sort of introduction; both for a general 
reason and for a special reason. 

In the first place such a study ought to be an ap- 
peal to mentality fully as much as to emotion. The 
emotional tug will be present whether designed or 
not You will be unable, unless you are subnormal 
— or at least abnormal — to read the incidents used 
as illustrations without a spontaneous revulsion of 
heart. The facts are passion-rousing facts. There- 
fore it becomes highly important, in dissecting them, 
to preserve the utmost possible detachment, and 
steadily to address the reader's intelligence. If a 
clean bill of indictment is to be brought in, the entire 
set of counts must be such as can go down into his- 
tory as solid and veridical. 

The second reason is quasi-personal. It happens 

to have fallen to my lot, in the line of duty, to talk 

vii 



PREFACE 

publicly in many cities upon the Unterseehooten; . 
and I have been a little oppressed by the inaccurate 
ideas which sometimes seem to have been left upon 
the popular mind. Confronted with the need of 
producing a correct and indelible impression by a 
few minutes' speech-making from a "standing start," 
any speaker is sometimes forced to resort to chiaro- 
scuro or caricature in order to drive his points home 
into the minds of all classes of auditors. Then, too, 
the newspaper men have a fatal proclivity for giving 
a sensational twist to the most carefully guarded 
language; and statements have been placed in my 
mouth so weirdly distorted as to provoke good hon- 
est American skepticism from any average man. 
For example there have been generously inserted 
impassioned descriptions of how the submarine 
which sank the Inisitania emerged and hovered 
gloatingly about the scene, although I have never 
possessed or hinted at any reliable evidence that the 
submarine in the Lusitania case was observed to 
emerge at all. A zealous and impressionable young 
man in the Northwest caused his newspaper to state 
that the subject of my address was, "Buckets of 
Blood"; and it has occasionally seemed as though 

the entire Fourth Estate believes that only an appeal 

viii 



PREFACE 

of the "Buckets of Blood" stripe can be effective in 
our democracy. 

Thus I have developed a longing to have my say 
out quietly and in extenso, without the use of omis- 
sions or high lights. The discussion will be galvanic 
enough at best. Justice cannot be done in dealing 
with these subsea raparees without the production 
of data such as to shock and to inflame; and the 
greater the calmness that can be achieved the better. 

iN^ow when an earnest and candid man sits down 
to give his earnest and patient consideration to ac- 
cusations so very grave as those which Humanity 
now levels against the German submarines, will not 
his first question be, "How has the truth of these al- 
leged facts been established ?" In other words is he 
not justified in a curiosity as to how the material 
which substantiates the charges has been gathered 
and authenticated? The answer must of course be 
affirmative. That is why it seems best to describe 
at the outset the manner in which the American 
consulates have worked in procuring evidence, — 
for any statements made regarding the Queenstown 
Consulate can be applied with minor variations to 
its sister offices abutting on the danger zone. 



INTRODUCTION 

The extent and importance of the submarine atro- 
cities which the American Consul at Queenstown was 
called upon to report to our Government during the 
period preceding our entry into the war are prob- 
ably matters of general knowledge. As for the qual- 
ity of the reports which were forthcoming in re- 
sponse to the exigency, the best evidence is the fact 
that a cablegram of commendation was sent to the 
Consul by the Secretary of State, an unusual ex- 
pression of merit in the Consular Service. 

Upon America's entry into the war the submarine 
depredations off Queenstown had no longer the sig- 
nificance which they had possessed when any one of 
them might constitute a cosils helU; and in June, 
1917, Consul Frost, whose health had suffered 
severely under the strain, was brought back to Amer- 
ica upon furlough, and was assigned to duty in the 
Department of State. Almost before he could be- 
gin his new duties, however, the Committee on Pub- 
lic Information procured permission to requisition 
his services for publicity work; and, with the co- 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

operation of the Chamber of Commerce of the 
United States, he was sent out to tell his story as 
the pioneer speaker in the Government's information 
campaign. The success of his tours, which extended 
throughout the west, southwest, and middle west, 
was immediate and striking. One of his first ad- 
dresses became somewhat of an international classic 
on the subject; and has since done wide service, not 
only throughout the British Isles under the title 
"Devils of the Deep," but also in translations in 
French and Spanish countries under the respective 
titles "Les Assassins de la Mer" and "Le Guerra 
Submarina de Alemania." 

It is rather fitting that the same American whose 
lot it was to be foremost in gathering evidence re- 
garding submarine warfare should also be the first 
to furnish a comprehensive popular summary and 
interpretation of that evidence. Mr. Frost's work 
for Mr. Creel, moreover, had the effect of keeping 
the entire subject before his mind, and thus enabled 
Hm to thread his way judiciously through the pit- 
falls which must beset any officer of the Department 
of State who writes upon such a topic at just this 
juncture. His work, it is believed, will be found 
to constitute as good a general survey of the sub- 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

marine campaign as is apt to be given to the public 
for a considerable time to come, and should rank 
among the great popular documents relating to the 
war. 

Mr. Frost's work with reference to Germany's vio- 
lations of well-recognized laws of marine warfare is 
indeed valuable, but it is in connection with Ger- 
many's deliberate crimes against the conscience of 
mankind that his testimony and conclusions have 
the gi^atest claim on our attention. 

FsANK Lyon Polk. 



idii 



CONTENTS 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

CHAPTER 

I. Gathering the Evidence . . . . 



II. Defenseless Ships 

III. Ships Which Attempt to Escape 

IV. Ships Torpedoed without Warning . 

V. Attacks on Passenger Ships 

VI. Personal Contact between Submarine 
Crews and Their Victims . . . 

VII. Lifeboats Deserted at Sea . . . 

VIII. German Motives and Morals . . 

IX. Summary and Appraisal .... 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

I. The Queenstown Background . 

II. The News and the Preparations 

III. The Catastrophe Proper 

IV. Rescue and Relief Work . . 
V. Dealing WITH THE Dead . . .f" 

VI. Why America Fights .... 



PAGE 

3 

27 
40 
53 

78 

102 
114 
136 
161 



173 
183 
193 
210 
223 
237 



XV 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Abandonment of a Sinking Vessel . . . Frontispiece 



FAcraa 

PAGE 



An American Destroyer Rescuing the Crew of a 
Torpedoed Transport 42 

A Sinking Merchantman Fired by Torpedo . . 62 

Typical Deck Scene on a Torpedoed Ship: The 
Falaba 72 

Open Boats 118 

Rescued Survivors of a Submarine Attack on 
Board an American Destroyer 134 

A German Submarine Surrendering to an Amer- 
ican Destroyer 154 

Graves of the Unidentified Victims of the Lusi- 
tania, Queenstown 228 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 



CHAPTEK I 

GATHEEING THE EVIDENCE 

The Lusitania tragedy proved to be only the black 
harbinger to a whole harpy-flight of German crimes 
in South Irish waters. They came rather slowly 
at first, but their accelerating frequency gradually 
darkened our entire horizon. The Queenstown Con- 
sulate found itself faced with a sequence of duties 
and opportunities for service, it is safe to say, as 
strange as ever confronted a consular office. 

The Atlantic Ocean between the Fastnet Kock 
Lighthouse and the Scilly Islands is, you will recall, 
the most crowded highway of commercial shipping 
on the globe. On a fine day I have stood upon the 
cliffs at Fortress Templebreedy and looked out to 
sea upon a perpetually shifting parade of steamships 
and sailing ships as far as the eye could reach. One 
glance at a trade-map will make clear how the vast 
capillary suck of commerce into Liverpool, Cardiff, 
Dublin and Glasgow pulls a majority of the vessels 
approaching the United Kingdom within something 

3 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

like a hundred miles of Queenstown. The con- 
verging sea-lanes from four continents furnish here a 
grand-scale demonstration of the world's water- 
borne commerce, and constitute the region an ideal 
theater for submarine operations. It was into this 
peaceful trade-sea that the German submersibles 
began their incursions, in the summer of 1915, to 
prey among the diligent merchantmen like sharks 
striking in among shoals of porpoises. 

Queenstown inevitably took on forthwith a new 
importance and interest. Our beautiful little city, 
clinging against its steep green hillside by the most 
charming tidal harbor in the world, grew in a few 
months from a population of eight thousand to more 
than ten thousand people. It had always been fa- 
mous for the picturesqueness of its streets, not only 
as a garrison town but as the British Naval head- 
quarters for all ^rish waters. In addition to the 
army and navy uniforms there were the Irish coun- 
try-people, with their donkey carts and shawled 
women, as well as the omni-present priests and po- 
lice and the merchant sailors from all lands. And 
now, as the German submarines pushed their forays 
nearer and nearer, and Queenstown became the clear- 
ing-house for survivors from their attacks, our streets 
gained a still further element of diversity in the 

4 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

groups of pathetic human salvage. We could 
hardly walk down Harbor Row without encountering 
men or women just saved from the ordeals of ex- 
posure and assault Every street-child in Queens- 
town old enough to point and cry, "Soldier," or, 
"Sailor," learned to know also the word, "Surviv- 
or," and to apply it to these oddly clad figures. 

In a single day, between midnight and midnight, 
in March of 1917, when the campaign was at its 
worst, we saw the survivors landed from no less 
than six different torpedoed ships! All in all, dur- 
ing my incumbency at Queenstown, that is up un- 
til June, 1917, two months after America entered 
the war, the Consulate made reports to the Secretary 
of State upon some eighty different submarine at- 
tacks in which American citizens or rights were im- 
periled or destroyed. 

In between fifty and sixty of these cases we took 
detailed legal testimony. In many of the instances 
our witnesses were American passengers. Among 
the male passengers there were business men, jour- 
nalists and authors, medical and professional men, 
and a good sprinkling of clerics; and among the 
female passengers there were wives of American 
officers or physicians, authoresses, actresses, nurses, 
and society women. In a greater number of in- 

5 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

stances the testimony came from American citizens 
serving in various capacities on foreign or Ameri- 
can vessels for pay. Their competency as witnesses 
ranged all the way from that of negro or Filipino 
deckhands or coal-passers up to that of a high-salaried 
expert from one of America's greatest electrical 
firms. Quite a few British ships carried one or 
more American officers or petty officers — deck-offi- 
cers, horse-foremen, boatswains, masters-at-arms, en- 
gineers, donkeymen, and galleymen. But whatever 
the rank, color, or social status of these American 
witnesses, they one and all came to the Consulate, 
at all hours of the day and night, straight from 
the sea, with the voices of their dead companions 
still ringing in their ears. They were examined 
while the occurrences were fresh and vivid in their 
minds. 

The survivors were brought in to the Queens- 
town wharves on every variety of craft. Often they 
had been picked up by an Admiralty vessel, or had 
been transferred at sea to such a vessel from the 
original rescue ship. Thus a humble Admiralty 
trawler might be packed to the gunwales with the 
survivors from some large ship, while a destroyer, 
an armed sloop, or a mine-layer might bring in 

6 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

only a handful of sailors from a lost barque. Often, J 
too, the rescue ship which came in to Queenstown t • 
would prove to be a swift passenger packet, a freight ^ 
liner or tramp, a schooner or barkentine, or even a 
fishing boat. In two or three cases the lifeboats 
themselves came rowing right in, all the long way 
past the frowning fastnesses of Carlisle and Cam- 
den and the lovely promontory of Cork-a-Beg, and _ 
drew directly into the Queenstown cambers. Such 
boats were always welcomed by an admiring group 
of water-front habitues, old seamen who could ap- 
preciate their feat. If they had rowed back from 
midstream of the River Styx, as figuratively of 
course they had, they could hardly have evoked ^-'^ 
greater wonder and admiration. ^^ 

In important cases the Consulate was usually 
notified by the Admiralty prior to the arrival of 
the ships carrying the survivors. We were thus '^ 
able to be at the dock to greet the American vie- \ 
tims and to have a preliminary talk with the sur- a 
viving ship's officers. The Laconia survivors ^^T^ 
landed late at night, for example; and after a hasty 
conversation with Captain Ervine, I took two or 
three American survivors — one of whom was Floyd 
Gibbons of the Chicago Tribune — to the Consulate ^ 

and fed them on sandwiches, chocolate and hot- ^' 

Y 



CX 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

flask tea while getting the facts from them right 
onto the typewriter in the form of cable reports. 
In the Cymric case we sat up all night, keeping in 
touch with Admiralty House, in order to get the; 
Naval wireless reports onto the cable as rapidly asi 
they came in. Then I took a morning train to Ban- 
try, and met my friend Captain Beadnell and his 
men as they stepped onto the pier at four o'clock 
that afternoon. By five o'clock I had taken their 
formal statements, and by five-thirty had filed my 
cables. Our mailed dispatches in all these cases 
were of course the fruit of much subsequent inves- 
tigation. In the Cymric case I did not finish check- 
ing up until noon of the second day; and in cases 
where more time was available, as it usually was, 
the inquiries were further protracted. 

When we were not able to receive notice of ar- 
rival actually in advance we always got it imme- 
diately upon the advent of the survivors at the of- 
fices of the Queenstown shipping agents. The first 
act of the senior officer surviving in each group of 
victims on reaching Queenstown would be to take 
his men to the ship's agents ; and the agents all very 
cordially helped the Consulate by letting us know 
if there were any Americans affected — saved or lost 
— and by sending the American survivors promptly 

8 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

to the Consulate. We tried not to let the respon- 
sibility for such notifications fall upon their busy 
shoulders, and took the initiative daily in keeping 
in touch with them. We also made frequent in- 
quiries upon the Royal Irish Constabulary and, if 
occasion presented, upon the Admiralty. I think 
hardly an American was landed at Queenstown from 
a torpedoed ship without finding himself at the Con- 
sulate within an hour's time. 

The personal needs of these victims were almost 
invariably attended to efficiently by the ships' agents, 
at the expense of the ships' owners. Food, lodg- 
ing, medical attendance and new clothing were pro- 
vided with the utmost good will and energy. Trans- 
portation to England was usually furnished by the 
Shipwrecked Mariners Society; and scores, if not 
hundreds, of American seamen profited by this 
broadminded practice. The regulations by which 
Queenstown is partially closed to shipping, and is 
wholly closed to the embarkation or debarkation of 
non-British persons, made it almost indispensable 
for the survivors to proceed to some English port 
to take a new ship; but this worked no financial 
hardship either upon passengers or seamen. 

The condition of the survivors on arrival at 
9 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

Queenstown was often pitiable; but, strange to say, 
in only rather few cases was it really grave. Vic- 
tims who had been drowned or killed by shellfire 
were commonly buried at sea; and such wounded 
persons as remained alive until they reached 
Queenstown had usually received only minor in- 
juries. The hospital cases, therefore, were apt to 
have arisen from flesh-wounds due to bombardment 
or from accidents or explosions during the attack. 
Superficial contusions and broken bones were not in- 
frequent. The cases of exhaustion from exposure 
yielded to warmth, food, and rest. 

The survivors from passenger vessels were as a 
rule more wretched than those from freight vessels. 
The grief-stricken members of decimated families 
added an element of distress ; and owing to the pres- 
ence of women and children there were more stretch- 
er cases and cases of dangerous collapse. And from 
passenger ships the corpses were often brought in. 
It would be almost a sacrilege for me to describe 
these poor clayey integuments of humanity for the 
purpose of working upon your feelings. We had 
often occasion to be honestly thankful for that queer, 
puzzled peacefulness which stamps the faces of the 
drowned. 

The naval and military surgeons were ably as- 
10 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

sisted and supplemented by local medical men and 
by Red Cross — V. A. D. — units. In fact tbere was 
customarily a redundancy of medical and surgical 
skill at hand. 

These facts, especially as to the efforts of the ships' 
agents, left the Consulate comparatively little to do 
in the way. of tangible humanitarian duties, at least 
after the first big cases which caught us all off our 
guard. "We loaned a good deal of money, usually 
on behalf of the Embassy funds; and occasionally 
interceded with various authorities for some trivial 
adjustment, always cheerfully accorded. We also 
sent messages to survivors' friends in the United 
States, and tried in personal ways to cheer and re- 
lieve our afflicted fellow-countrymen. But the pic- 
tures which have sometimes been painted in the 
American press of our Consulate's staff in the role 
of ministering angels have really been much over- 
drawn. 

In this connection I may mention that the forti- 
tude and determined cheerfulness exhibited by the 
survivors were perpetual sources for pleasure and 
pride. In cases where there were no fatalities the 
predominant note was one of hearty courage and 
goodfellowship. The sailor-boys would score jokes off 
one another's petty misfortunes with all the light- 

11 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

heartedness which is said to mark the trench wit of 
the Doughboys and Tommies. Especially was this> 
true of the professional seamen. Commend me to a 
sailor for a certain frank upstanding manliness; 
which landsmen — or certainly many city men — 
seem to miss. The fact that the English are a sea- 
faring people must surely account in no small meas^ 
ure for their retention of national stamina. The 
seas are England's lungs, which renew and oxyge- 
nate her racial character. 

Regarded as witnesses the American passengers 
showed every shade of responsibility and irrespon- 
sibility. I take the liberty of dwelling upon this 
feature in order that the reader may be assured 
that proper discounting was made as to the reliability 
of each piece of testimony. The lady passengers, 
we found, made either very good or very poor witr- 
nesses. Whenever the feminine quality of patience, 
which causes women to be such good mathematicians 
and linguists, could be brought into play we secured 
very much accurate detail — sometimes too much de- 
tail and too little discrimination as to vital features. 
Perhaps this last observation applies equally to 
both sexes, for quite a few of the masculine as 
well as the feminine passengers took delight in re- 

12 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

counting minutely their own personal adventures 
and experiences during the disasters. Such state- 
ments were excellent exemplifications of what is 
known by psychologists as the phenomenon of total 
recall. Amid the welter of irrelevant facts in these 
narratives there would often appear bits of highly 
germane evidence; and the authenticity of such por- 
tions was all the better for the mass of meticulous 
trivia in which they were embedded. 

The newspaper men, some of whom were pres- 
ent at almost every passenger catastrophe, made the 
very best witnesses we had. They are trained at 
making and taking mental note of their observa- 
tions. The next class in responsibility was that of 
the business men; presumably because they are ac- 
customed to dealing in the practical and the con- 
crete. On the whole we were rather disappointed 
in the statements elicited from the professional men. 
Their characters, if not their faculties, seemed to be 
a trifle too highly sensitized and to lack the matter- 
of-factness which makes for the soundest legal demon- 
stration. 

In turning to the American witnesses from freight 
vessels this last distinction is also useful, at least 
by analogy. Those of the seamen, horse-tenders, and 
firemen who had some smattering of education or 

13 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

sophistication were eager and responsive; but their 
observations did not appear to be quite so trust- 
worthy as those of the men who had always earned 
their livelihoods by stern physical labor. Especially 
did we learn to distrust the city boys, who seemed 
either to be runaway readers of Nick Carter fiction 
or else, in a few cases, flashy slum-rats with not 
quite enough wits to maintain themselves in the un- 
derworld at home. 

But I must hasten to emphasize that in every ag- 
gregation of survivors we were able to find ade- 
quate sources of the most dependable kind of testi- 
mony. We soon learned to identify the most val- 
uable members of each group, and seldom failed to 
get satisfactory details. We checked up the sur- 
vivors' stories individually against one another in 
many cases, and sometimes made corrections in this 
way. The American witnesses were inclined to be 
more shocked and repelled by the conduct of the 
submarines than were the Europeans; and this 
formed a minor reason why we took the utmost 
pains in nearly every case to get the deposition of 
the British or Scandinavian ships' officers. 

The primary reason for taking officers' affidavits 
lay in the superior knowledge and skill which of- 
ficers possess as to all technical sea matters; and 

14 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

tHeir testimony also had great value merely as cor- 
roborating the American testimony. We came to 
feel quite a little confidence in our devices for test- 
ing and appraising the various evidence; and I can 
therefore allow myself to express the opinion that 
the Norwegian and English licensed mariners are 
the most inveterate tellers of sober-daylight truth 
that can anywhere be encountered. Time and again 
I have heard them testify in the most stolid and 
matter-of-fact manner to facts which might easily 
have been omitted or modified to damage the Ger- 
man side of the case or strengthen the Allied side. 
The innate taciturnity of the northern races seems 
to have as its complement a self-possessed and un- 
imaginative truthfulness in whatever statements 
these men do permit themselves to emit. 

Although they are inclined to be both positive 
and pertinacious they are careful and reasonable. 
I remember a master who insisted that the torpedo 
had absolutely transpierced the hull of his ship and 
had been seen by him to emerge on the far side 
while exploding. Of course a torpedo, with its 
comparatively light weight and slow speed, can never 
acquire the momentum to penetrate very far into a 
ship before it explodes; and this fact we tried tact- 
fully to bring out It was curious to see the man- 

15 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

ner in which the captain consented to take our point 
of view under advisement, as it were; and the mix- 
ture of frankness and reluctance with which he even- 
tually admitted that his observation must have been 
mistaken. 

How heedfully the Consulate tried to work in 
discarding questionable testimony may be illustrated 
by the way the advent of the supersubmarines was 
handled. Supersubmarine stories began to rear 
their heads among the narratives of the less reliable 
seamen and stokers as early as July, 1916; and 
we took care to go into each one and dispose of it 
by the evidence from professional American seamen 
and from the ships' officers. This had occurred, at 
infrequent intervals, for so many months that we 
developed a settled idea that the diving-cruiser was 
to remain a myth. We came to classify it mentally 
with the detonation of distant explosives by wire- 
less "purple rays," if not actually with the Cape 
Cod sea-serpent. I was accordingly brought up all 
standing one day in the spring of 1917 when a 
British master of very solid type testified that the 
submarine which had sunk his ship had been over 
three hundred feet in length. I turned to the chief 
engineer and said, half -jokingly, "You are a 

16 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

Scotchman and a natural skeptic, besides being a 
man who deals in mechanical precision. You won't 
support any such Jules Verne tale?" But he an- 
swered simply, "It's God's truth, Mr. Frost. She 
was three hundred feet long." Ten days later came 
the startling jump in the weekly figure of sinkings 
to forty-two ships of over sixteen hundred tons. 
The blue-water submarines had really arrived. 

In the taking of so much testimony there were 
bound to be occasional little diverting incidents, 
such as go to swell the fund of court-room anecdotal 
humor. It is no disparagement of the negro race 
to say that the negro seamen often seemed anxious 
principally to give whatever answers they thought 
might please us best. There was a tendency on 
the part of British West India black boys, frequently 
found among these crews along with American 
negroes, to claim American origin, apparently for 
the purpose of gaining the earnest attention of an 
official for their stories, or for the purpose of hav- 
ing the solemn thrill of being placed upon oath. Out 
of several instances of this kind I recall especially 
one husky and dusky chap, with rolling bloodshot 
eyes, who burst into the office in a fine state of in- 
duced exhilaration. He boomed out, in a superb 
African bass voice, "Ah wants mah Consul," and 

17 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

proceeded to try to interest us in his tale of subma- 
rine disaster. Two or three well-placed questions 
by Mr. Thompson, the Vice-Consul, were enough to 
show that he was a Bahama boy. 

During the last months of my incumbency at 
Queenstown we began to get "repeats," or men whom 
we had interviewed in previous cases. We saw a 
dozen different men who had "been torpedoed" as 
many as three times; and heard of men who had 
figured in four or even five submarine incidents. 
One stoker witness came to the Consulate in ex- 
cellent clothing, so that I remarked casually, "I 
see you have been to the stores already for your new 
outfit." "IsTot at all. Sir," he answered; "this was 
my third time at being torpedoed; and so when she 
sighted the submarine I went below and put on all 
my good clothes, knowing we should save only what 
we stood up in." 

Jn the case of the Canadian last spring, we went 
down to the wharf to meet the survivors in a drizzle 
and fog. I touched on the arm, with some intro- 
ductory query, the first man I could locate in 
the throng with an officer's uniform. He turned 
around, and I shall never forget the pained and 
wounded expression with which he replied, "Why, 
don't you know me, Mr. Frost? I'm Dr. Patrick 

18 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

Bums, whose affidavit you took in the Ihermn 
case. I've been taking notes for you all through 
this affair; and was looking forward to your know- 
ing me." A second look beneath the stubble beard 
and grime revealed the genial face of this energetic 
American ship's surgeon whom I had sworn in rela- 
tion to the Iberian case nearly two years previously. 
And he had actually been taking notes for me from 
the moment the attack had commenced, as imper- 
turbably as if he had been at a clinic in a ]^ew 
England hospital. 

l^ot all the persons rescued after submarine at- 
tacks off Ireland came to Queenstown. Quite fre- 
quently crews or passengers would be landed at 
Castletown Berehaven, famed for its copper mines, 
at Bantry, which is almost as truly "the home of 
beauty" as Killarney, at Schull, a wild fisher vil- 
lage, or at Cahirciveen, where the Atlantic Cable 
emerges. In these cases the survivors usually went 
through to England without making the rail detour 
to Queenstown, and we were forced to hasten up to 
Cork or Mallow to take their statements while they 
were making train connections at those junction- 
points. Sometimes only thirty or forty minutes 
were available. In three or four cases it was only 

19 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

possible to collect provisional material while jolting 
rapidly in an Irish jaunting-car from one railway 
station at Cork to another. Eight or ten times we 
went to the Sailors' Home at Cork and interviewed 
our men in a fine deep-sea atmosphere of boiled 
cabbage and pig's head. Then it would be neces- 
sary to dash off to a nearby hotel and talk with the 
officers while the latter were attacking their first 
respectable meal on shore just before their train 
was to leave. 

Needless to say the affidavits procured in this 
hustled fashion were mailed to their makers for re- 
vision and confirmation, or were confirmed by supple- 
mentary affidavits taken by the consular offices at 
Liverpool, London, or Cardiff. But there were sur- 
prisingly few corrections. A rapid-fire of carefully 
prepared questions launched at a group of seamen en- 
gaged in tucking away honest provender seems to dis- 
lodge the plain truth almost automatically, without 
any chance for distortion born of irritation or imagi- 
nation. The men would correct one another noisily, 
and thresh out a point among themselves in thirty 
seconds, so as to give me a consensus which stood 
the test of any amount of subsequent checking up 
either by myself or by my eminent colleague. Con- 
sul Horace Lee Washington of Liverpool. In fact 

20 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

I think that the staccato, impromptu character of 
these interviews constituted a real ^guaranty of their 
bona fides. 

The procedure followed by the Queenstown Con- 
sulate in conducting investigations as to submarine 
outrages is not unlike that in a dozen other consul- 
ates. In addition to the fine affidavits prepared 
by Consul Washington and Vice Consul Watson at 
Liverpool — which will be permanent memorials as 
to the induction of America into the war — great 
service has been given by the consular offices at 
London, Algiers, Havre, Malta and Cardiff, and 
to a somewhat less degree by those at Bristol, Glas- 
gow, La Eochelle, Marseilles and Belfast. 

The submarine campaign, as depicted by the af- 
fidavits taken by the Consular Service, constitutes 
America's principal overt grievance against Ger- 
many; and of course it is also one of the most sig- 
nificant features of the general German spirit 
against which the entire civilized world is warring. 
The degree of credence which is yielded to the con- 
sular evidence is thus an important matter. As to 
the Queenstown office I shall always like to believe 
that, in addition to the unusually large number of 
important cases handled by us, there was one es- 

21 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

pecial case — an incredibly abominable submarine 
crime — which formed the actual precipitating cause 
of President Wilson's decision to declare war. But 
this is only conjecture. 

The various consuls have undoubtedly possessed 
somewhat varying points of view of a nature to af- 
fect their work of evidence-gathering. In my own 
case, as in that of many of my colleagues, it hap- 
pened that, being a man of legal training, I took a 
professional pride in conducting these inquiries with 
juridical impartiality. Most consuls of the newer 
school, too, have doubtless like myself been imbued 
with the peace-idealism of the past fifteen years in 
America; and have doubtless learned a rather spe- 
cial love for the country which we serve. Thus our 
entire original bias, if it must be admitted that any 
bias existed, was toward minimizing the German 
misdeeds, and toward explaining them away, in 
order to avert war from America, 

In my own case there was even a further influ- 
ence. It chances that a year of my boyhood was spent 
in the Fatherland, and left me with a deep-rooted 
liking and admiration for all things German. I at- 
tended the Yolkschulen, snapped beans with the 
other boys at recess-times, and partook in due course 
both in the school walking-tours and in the rattan- 

22 



GATHERING THE EVH)ENCE 

discipline. I have the pleasantest possible memo- 
ries of the little cornucopias of cherries, the good- 
humored soldiers who mounted guard at the door 
of the Colonel who lodged below us, and the fasci- 
nating play-days around the old tannery where 
Prince von Bismarck roomed in his student days. To 
this day if I were awakened from a profound sleep > 
to hear the word "German" I believe my mechanical 
cortical reaction would be one of warm cordiality. 

It will be evident that I was not at the outset of 
the war precisely a prejudiced medium for discov- 
ering German atrocities where none existed. It 
was only the ceaseless avalanche of facts pouring in 
upon me week after week and month after month 
which gradually convinced me that something has 
come over the German people in Germany. "Facts 
are stubborn things"; and I have found myself, as 
a conscientious commissioned officer, constrained to 
bear faithful testimony that the German submarine 
campaign has been carried on with a depravity and 
degradation which we could not have foreseen and 
would not have believed of the German people. 

And now we may allow ourselves to turn to a 
general exposition of the methods and spirit of the 
campaign as shown by the consular affidavits. It 

23 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

13 worth noting that the most critical and crucial 
period of the campaign was comprised by the early 
months of 1917. The restraints of humanity and 
of the law of nations were increasingly discarded 
by the submarines during the summer and autumn 
of 1916; and at the beginning of February, 1917, 
when the unrestricted warfare was announced, the 
announcement was merely a shameless avowal of a 
policy already in vigor. The submarine attacks dur- 
ing the winter and early spring of 1917 attained a 
quality which America could no longer overlook. It 
is these attacks, accordingly, which will receive the 
closest scrutiny from historians of the Great War. 
The statements, illustrative incidents and expres- 
sions of opinion given below are based in the main 
upon Queenstown investigations, and special atten- 
tion has been bestowed upon the critical period just 
indicated. The Queenstown Consulate had no con- 
nection with several important cases, such as the 
Falaba, Sussex, and Persia; of course the large 
amount of evidence which we did accumulate — 
and it was large not only positively but relatively 
— was not sufficient on some points to permit con- 
clusive deductions. Therefore I have not hesitated 
to refer occasionally to corroborative cases handled 

24 



GATHERING THE EVIDENCE 

by other consulates, and even to facts which came 
to our knowledge at Queenstown informally. 

For convenience in treatment, the German man- 
ner, or practical tactics, of conducting the U-boat 
campaign may be considered under five general 
groups or divisions, although something will then re- 
main to be said regarding the spirit of the campaign. 
The five groups are as follows: 

(1) The manner of attack upon unarmed ships, 
usually sailing-ships or the poorer class of steam- 
ships. In cases involving such vessels the subma- 
rines have been able to emerge and maneuver freely 
on the surface of the sea, with very scant misgiv- 
ings as to danger. Thus the submarine nature has 
had rather free scope to display itself. 

(2) The manner of attack upon freight ships of 
fair size, which might be presumed to be armed. 
In cases of this class the submarines have done their 
work while submerged, and have used torpedoes in- 
stead of shellfire or bombs. This class of cases is 
of course by far the heaviest and most important 
at the present time (March, 1918). 

(3) The fact as well as manner of attack upon 
ships which might be presumed to carry passengers. 
The large size of passenger liners, and the ethical 

25 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

and legal aspects of cases involving them, obviously 
place such cases in a class by themselves. 

(4) The manner in which the submarines treat 
survivors while still on the scene of the attacks, 
either in the life-boats or in the water. The per- 
sonal demeanor of the U-boat officers and men to- 
ward their victims is fairly uniform, irrespective of 
whether the vessel concerned belongs to the first, 
second, or third of the above classes. 

(5) The fact as well as the manner of leaving 
survivors to the mercy of the elements far away 
from land. This feature, also, is common to the 
attacks upon all three classes of ships, and may 
therefore be separated off and dealt with distinctly. 



CHAPTER II 



DEFENSELESS SHIPS 



The presence of sailing-ships, and of unarmed 
ships generally, in the danger zone is now a thing 
of the past; but such ships were plentiful in the 
zone up until midsummer of 1916, and were there 
in some numbers even as late as the summer of 1917. 
The German submarines in attacking these vessels 
enjoyed ample facilities for working unhampered, 
without the fear of guns or speed on the part of their 
victims to cramp their natural impulses or methods. 

And in the early days of the war, to be quite 
fair, it was the ordinary custom of the submersibles 
to warn a sailing-ship or small steamer by two or 
three wide shots. When the vessel heaved to — ' 
which these crafts have always done with the utmost 
alacrity — the submarine would hail or signal an or- 
der to take to the lifeboats. It would then stand 
passively and contentedly by, and give the crew 
whatever amount of time they needed to commence 
as favorably as possible their dire struggle to reach 

27 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

the land. A typical case was that of the Cardiff 
barque Cardonia, a coal carrier. She sighted a sub- 
marine twenty-four miles off a famous Irish land- 
mark, in April, 1916, in moderate weather. The 
U-boat fired two shots, palpably designed merely as a 
warning to heave to. The Cardonia of course com- 
plied, and the Germans then approached and informed 
the master that he might take thirty minutes to aban- 
don his ship, or more if he could show a reason. Later, 
when the ship had been abandoned, the submarine 
came up to the lifeboats in friendly fashion and gave 
them correct and helpful advice about making for 
the land. 

While this case was typical of the period in which 
it occurred, there did transpire brutal cases even 
then. "When the least undue dilatoriness was im- 
puted to the master of an attacked ship in taking 
to the boats the submarine made no bones about 
firing repeatedly, sometimes through the rigging. 
Indeed, when any broad statement is made as to 
just which kind of practices were prevalent at the 
various stages of the campaign, it must be under- 
stood that numerous exceptions can always be cited 
against such a generalization. 

But in a majority of the cases of attacks upon 
defenseless ships up until the autumn of 1916 there 

28 

/ 



DEFENSELESS SHIPS 

was no ill conduct on the part of the submarine. 
The latter were usually in rather good spirits at 
finding such easy victims, and often permitted 
themselves a few half-ironical amenities with the 
men whom they were about to desert on the sea. 
There occur to me the cases of the Chancellor, Hes- 
ione and Angjo-C olumbian as showing what the 
Germans could do, when they wished, in the way 
of decency. Such cases indicate the manner in 
which the campaign would have been permanently 
carried on if it had been in the hands of most civ- 
ilized peoples. 

For as the campaign progressed, and notably dur- 
ing the late summer and the autumn of 1916, the 
submarines' manner of dealing with these helpless 
little steamers or sailers became increasingly harsh 
and sharp. Instead of firing two or three warning 
shots they would fire six or eight, aimed apparently 
to hit the ship. Instead of allowing such time as 
seemed desirable for taking to the boats they began 
to set very narrow time limits — fifteen, ten, or even 
five minutes — and to enforce these limits with Draco- 
nian rigor. For example the steamship Tottenham, 
hailing from Baltimore, Maryland, was attacked on 
August 3, 1916; and the ten-minute time limit im- 

29 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

posed tipoii her had not quite expired when the 
submarine began shelling her continuously. 

By the end of 1916 and the early part of 1917 
the U-boat men were plunging deeper and deeper 
into inhumanity. Their so-called warnings had de- 
generated in the main into unremitting and vicious 
bombardments without pause or pity. They had 
ceased to hail, assist, or instruct their victims at 
all; at least until the crews had taken to the boats 
in frantic haste under a steady fusillade, and had 
come well clear of the vessels. 

A full-rounded example of this natural ultimate 
of the policy which had been evolving is the case 
of the Madura. The Madura was a little Russian 
barque carrying creosoted pine timber from Pen- 
sacola, Florida; and was attacked by a submarine 
just before noon one day in the spring of 1917. 
The weather was not really severe, although there 
was a stiff spring breeze and the waves were choppy. 
The submersible appeared less than a half-mile 
astern, and promptly began a merciless shellfire. 
The master of the Madura signaled submission in- 
stantly, even going so far as to cut down his main- 
sail upon the submarine's first shot. The subma- 
rine utterly ignored this pitiable self-abasement. It 

30 



DEFENSELESS SHIPS 

came up shooting, and continued to fire incessantly 
into the Madura. 

Thirty minutes later when the Madura's lifeboat 
was rescued by a friendly craft it was a perfect 
shambles. The master, a huge black-bearded Finn, 
sat safely in the stem-sheets with his wife beside 
him; but at their feet two dead sailors lay weltering 
in blood, and a third was just coughing out his life. 
Four other occupants of the boat were gory with 
lacerations from shrapnel. These inoffensive work- 
ingmen had been slaughtered and torn after they 
had surrendered, and while they were trying des- 
perately to comply with any command the Prus- 
sians might have been graciously pleased to mani- 
fest. 

I can cite you instance after instance like this, 
in which a frail and unarmed craft has made sub- 
mission and pleaded for quarter, like a little dog 
that rolls over on its back and begs, and then has 
been pounded and raked with shellfire, sometimes 
with the most sickening casualties. Here are a 
few: The Tungstan, Gaspian, Dalbeattie, GaXgorm 
Castle, Lynton, Valkyrie, Hainault, Storstad, 
Caimhill, Rowanmore, Iberian, Vanduara, Margor 
reta, Alice, Margam Abbey, Wallace, Lucy Ander- 
son, Arethusa and Cammoney. In many of these 

31 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

cases there were casualties, and in some of them 
fatalities, from the pitiless shellfire. 

This list could be greatly amplified, but should 
suffice to establish the fact of wanton bombardments 
against unarmed ships. Like any creature which 
depends upon stealth for security, and is thus a 
natural coward, the submarine exhibits the meanest 
type of cruelty the moment stealth becomes unneces- 
sary. I usually think of the German U-boats as 
selachians — genus squalus, Linn. — ^but the shark, 
after all, is no petty-minded coward; and I dare 
say Winston Churchill's phrase "water-rats" is bet- 
ter in the present connection. 

The changing character of the German use of 
gunfire became apparent only gradually, and for sev- 
eral months we were puzzled about its purpose. "We 
could not bring ourselves to realize that it was ma- 
lignantly intended. One or two shots across a ship's 
bow are merely due notice, and three or four are 
legitimate warning. Beyond that number the firing 
may assume successively the aspect of admonish- 
ment, threat, and finally bombardment. We were 
loth to believe that the last-named stage had been 
reached. 

In the first place bombardment seemed perfectly 
32 



DEFENSELESS SHIPS 

pointless, since we knew that the vessels were ha- 
bitually surrendering precipitately upon the sub- 
marines' initial shots. Certainly the firing could 
not be designed either to overcome or to punish re- 
sistance. In the second place if they were really 
trying to sink the ships or kill the occupants the 
firing seemed surprisingly ineffective for the Teu- 
ton arch-exponents of efficiency. Out of twenty or 
thirty shots fired at a vessel only four or five hits 
would be scored, and some of these would merely 
scamp the sticks or superstructures. In case after 
case, too, there would be no fatalities, and even no 
casualties. It seemed incredible that the proceed- 
ing was murderously intended when it actually is- 
sued in so little murder. 

Like most civilians I had an undue faith in the 
unerring precision and deadly efficacy of what has 
been advertised as modern scientific warfare; and 
was therefore misled by the dearth of results from 
the submarine shellfire attacks. It was only after 
the evidence began to be unmistakably copious that 
I remembered that only one bullet out of many hun- 
dred in land warfare finds its target, and recalled 
Clausewitz' dictum that every act of war is at best 
but "action in a resisting medium." 

'For it gradually became quite clear that the Ger- 
33 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

mans were really doing their best, or worst, in the 
way of shell j&re against ships. Their firing simply 
was ineffective. In the case of the Swanmore they 
fired over two hundred shots, and were finally com- 
pelled to use a torpedo. Eour Americans were 
killed, it may be parenthetically said. In the case 
of the Iriston the submarine fired fourteen shots 
from less than one hundred yards' distance, and 
then resorted to a torpedo. At the Seatonia twelve 
shots were fired from a distance of something over 
a mile, and not one of them scathed the ship. These 
cases are cited at random, and more could be picked 
up almost endlessly. Of course instances did occur 
in which shellfire did succeed in sinking ships; but 
the only one which comes to mind was that of an 
abandoned ship into which the submarine fired at 
pointblank range whenever the rolling of the seas 
exposed surfaces far below the waterline. There- 
fore, in my opinion, it may be stated definitely that 
shellfire from the guns which were carried by Ger- 
man submarines prior to the year 1917 could not 
sink even a sailing ship except at close range. Fir- 
ing from any distance over one-half mile, the sub- 
marines' guns missed their marks entirely as a us- 
ual thing; and when they did hit they hit virtually 
at haphazard. An excellent illustration of poor 

34 



DEFENSELESS SHIPS 

submarine gunnery in American waters is the at- 
tack on the tug Perth Amhoy and her barges, off 
Cape Cod, on July 21, 1918. If newspaper ac- 
counts are correct the submarine took an hour to 
sink the first one of its five targets, and was forced to 
approach to one hundred yards' distance, although 
the sea was calm. 

iNot that the Germans counted upon this defi- 
ciency to soften the severity of their attacks. The 
great purpose of these wanton bombardments, as 
you will now be in a position to understand, was 
the terrorizing of the crews of the ships attacked. 
The idea was to induce among the merchant seamen 
of all nations a strong horror of entering the zone 
infested by the submarines. And in order to com- 
pass this purpose it was desirable that as many 
deaths and injuries as possible might result from 
the shelling. These casualties were not desired so 
much for their own sake as because they might 
prove a means to the more important end of exclud- 
ing all but the most reckless freight ships from the 
waters around the British Isles. But they were 
explicitly desired, nevertheless, and the slaughter 
wrought by the bombardments must bear the odium 
of being willful. An added incentive was the effect 
of shellfire in frequently rendering uninhabitable 

35 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

vessels which no amount of shelling would have been 
able to sink. By sacrificing the lives of a few more 
victims the submarines were thus able to save the 
cost of using torpedoes, for they could by bombard- 
ment drive the occupants out of a ship and send a 
party to sink her by bombs. 

And as the cases multiplied there did eventually 
appear a sufficient quantity of maiming and mur- 
der by gunfire to give rationality to the "frightful- 
ness" motive for these superficially purposeless bom- 
bardments. However conscious the submarines 
might be of the low efficiency of their shooting it 
never became necessary for them to give up hope, 
and they never did give up hope, of producing at 
least an appreciable amount of damage and death, 
and hence of terror. We encountered enough fatal- 
ities to be sure that they might reasonably believe 
the frightfulness policy to have a measurable ef- 
fectiveness. 

To give the final verification to this conclusion we 
presently commenced to get quite a few cases in 
which the shelling ceased as soon as the lifeboats were 
clear of the ships. This showed that when once the 
occupants had left a vessel the submarines no longer 
cared to pour shrapnel into it ! Conceivably some 
one might say that if the firing were intended to 

36 



DEFENSELESS SHIPS 

kill and terrorize seamen it ought to have been ex- 
tended to the lifeboats when they were clear of the 
ship. But to my mind the fact that the submarines 
did not — ordinarily — have quite the will to do this 
is merely evidence that after all the Germans were 
still human beings with some human instincts. I 
therefore regard the cases in which the submarines 
lost interest in firing at a ship as soon as her crew 
had gotten away from her — cases like the Lynion, 
Strathtay, Galgorm Castle, and Eagle Point — as ler 
gitimate indications that the underlying purpose of 
the fusillades against unarmed ships was terrorism 
by means of death and danger. 

I do not mean to assert that there were no cases in 
which the firing was due merely to nervousness or 
flusteredness ; or that there were no cases in which 
the commanders fired, as it were, out of excess of 
precaution, with a general idea expressed by the ver- 
nacular phrase of "hurry-up regardless." But as a 
broad policy the development of systematic cannon- 
ades against helpless ships was inspired by a belief 
in Schrechlichheit pure and simple. 

A clean-cut case of frightfulness shellfire was that 
of the Lane & McAndrew steamship Saxonian, a colr 
ton ship of twenty-eight hundred tons register, laden 

37 



ger:^an submarine warfare 

at Port Arthur, Texas. She was unarmed, and she 
carried no wireless apparatus. At a quarter past 
five o'clock one evening in Fehruary, 1916, when 
still two hundred and eighty miles from southwest 
Ireland, the Saxonian was fired upon by a submarine 
from about three-fourths of a mile off her port bow. 
The weather was moderately rough, and night was 
closing down. The Saxonian stopped her engines 
instantly, and heaved to ; and the crew began to take 
to the boats in frantic haste. The shelling contin- 
ued relentlessly, although the submarine could not 
possibly have failed to see that the vessel was being 
abandoned. At that stage in the campaign there 
was hardly any reason why the submarine should sus- 
pect any ship of carrying a gun, and the unarmed 
condition of the Saxonian was of course apparent 
as soon as she failed to reply to the submarine's 
shots. 

And here took place an episode worth recounting. 
A Pennsylvania boy named James Weygand, a clean- 
cut, brown-eyed young fellow twenty years of age, 
was serving on the Saxonian as a fireman. During 
the bombardment he arrived at the top of the ladder 
leading down to the boats just ahead of the ship's 
boatswain, a man of middle age. Under the circum- 
stances Weygand might have hurried down ahead 

38 



DEFENSELESS SHIPS 

of the boatswain without exciting the faintest com- 
ment; but although the shells were whining about 
them he stepped gallantly and promptly aside and 
let the elder man precede him toward safety. And 
by a whimsey of fate while both men were on the 
ladder against the ship's side a German shell burst 
behind them and killed the boatswain instantly, while 
Weygand escaped with two painful flesh wounds. 

As a classic instance of virtue proving to carry its 
own reward this incident might grace the pages of 
Oliver Optic; but, entirely aside from that aspect, 
I recall no case in which Mrs. Frost and I took more 
pleasure in hospital visits. Our hero compatriot 
from Hatboro is a German- American, but as in the 
case of the vast majority of German-Americans we 
were proud to have him as a fellow-countryman. 



CHAPTEK III 

SHIPS WHICH ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

An argument sometimes put forward about these 
villainous shellfire attacks upon defenseless ships is 
that they may be the result of belief by the subma- 
rines that the ships are in reality disguised fighting 
vessels or decoys. Our periodicals have mentioned 
from time to time the use by the Allies of so-called 
Q-boats or "mystery-ships" which conceal deadly 
armament under an apparently innocent exterior. If 
a submarine is apprehensive that it has to deal with 
such a craft its ethical rights with regard to shell- 
fire are beyond dispute excellent. 

This argument, by the way, too, is typical of quite 
a number which one hears emitted occasionally in 
smoking compartments, club rooms, or hotel lobbies. 
They are usually delivered either in confidential 
whispers or else, for contrast, by some loud talker 
who makes the innuendo that our execration of sub- 
marine methods is merely for popular consumption 
and is unworthy the credulity of four-footed adult 

40 



I 

SHIPS WHICH ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

males. Such arguments deserve to be dragged out 
for public scrutiny whenever they can be found. 

In the present instance the answer is almost too 
obvious to call for statement. If a U-boat really had 
any idea that it had encountered a Q-boat it would 
not think of attempting to come to the surface and 
attack by shellfire; it would remain submerged and 
use torpedoes. In case the supposed merchant ship 
were actually thought to be a wolf in sheep's cloth- 
ing the submarine would never expose itself by un- 
dertaking a bombardment, but would resort to its 
peculiar immunities in a subsea attack. Thus it is 
clear that while the fear of mystery-ships may in 
rare instances account for the use of torpedoes with- 
out warning it has no relevance whatever as an ex- 
cuse for cruel fusillades against surrendered ships. 

Another and weightier argument, propounded by 
the German chancellery itself, is that a vessel which 
seeks to escape from a submarine places herself out- 
side the protection of international law. It has been 
a rule of the laws of war that an innocent merchant 
ship is bound to submit to visit and search by a bel- 
ligerent vessel of war, and must not seek to evade 
it. A non-combatant vessel which is so unwilling 
to undergo examination that it resorts to flight may 
be attacked by a war vessel to compel submission, 

41 



GERIVIAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

and may even be destroyed. Accordingly the Ger- 
mans have piously pleaded injured innocence or tra- 
duced rectitude whenever taken to task for shelling 
a ship which has tried to escape. 

But this rule of the jus gentium has two sides to 
it. In return for the quiet obedience of a merchant 
ship its adversary is bound not to sink the ship un- 
less it carries contraband, and in any event to respect 
the lives of the civilian seamen and passengers. 
Even if a raider or blockader can establish, by care- 
ful search and by documents, his right to seize — or 
if unavoidable to sink — the victim-ship, he is still 
bound under the familiar formula of the texts "to 
place her occupants in safety, and see that they are 
landed at a convenient port." 

And it is not from this civilized visit and search 
that ships' crews try to escape in the present war. 
They try to escape from being hustled with violence 
into fragile open boats and left to be the sport of ocean 
tempests. In some cases the German brand of visit 
and search carries savageries even worse than this 
refined cruelty, as will appear presently. In other 
words the Germans have never for a single day car- 
ried out their side of the international code. They 
have from the first claimed the right of setting harm- 

42 



SHIPS WHICH ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

less non-combatants adrift in small boats at any dis- 
tance from land. And yet with all the ignoble cun- 
ning of Shylock they have claimed their pound of 
flesh in dealing with America about attempted flight 
by submarine victims. As though the pitiable at- 
tempts of unarmed ships to make a run for safety 
gave to the iron squalidae a license to slay and de- 
stroy to the top of their bent! 

I saw the dismembered fragments of the master of 
the Anglo-Calif omian, Captain Archibald Panlow, 
carried ashore in a burlap gunny-bag early on a dis- 
mal February morning in 1916, with the mangled 
bodies of eight of his men. Gouts of their flesh and 
long splashes of their blood plastered the bridge- 
deck of their ship. The crime for which they died 
was that they preferred a chance at escape to a cer- 
tainty of being hounded into little boats in wild 
weather and left alone on the face of the deep. 

There was the Iberian, too, whose navigators 
yielded for a few moments to the Nature-implanted 
impulse toward self-preservation. In the course of 
the "disciplinary" firing which the submarine ad- 
ministered to check this improper effort to fly, six 
of the Iberians men were killed and eight were 
wounded. One of the dead men was a Yankee horse- 
foreman, — a Bostonian named Mark Wylie. 

43 



GERMAN SUBJVIARINE WARFARE 

The shellfire which was poured into the Bowanr 
more and the Dalbeattie may have been gratuitous, 
of course, but was probably provoked by the pathetic 
attempts of these ships to get away. It is worth 
mentioning that in each of these cases there were 
several witnesses who believed that the firing was 
aimed at the lifeboats as well as the ship. 

In other cases there has been no question at all 
but that the Germans have fired upon lifeboats be- 
cause vessels have sought to escape. Supposedly 
they are vindicating the rules of international law 
and defending the right of visit and search ! In 
the case of the Eavestone the submarine raked the 
lifeboats in a spiteful temper because the old collier 
had tried to stoke up and knock an extra knot or 
two out of her decrepit engines. 

The Eavestone, a craft of only one thousand and 
sixty-three tons, outward bound from Barry Docks, 
Cornwall, to the Mediterranean, was attacked at noon 
in February, 1917, when ninety-five miles off the 
Fastnet. Her injudicious valor in trying to give 
the submarine a run seemed to irritate the superman 
in charge of the latter quite beyond his superself- 
control. He brought his craft rushing up to the 
poor little Eavestone , firing at every jump. The 
Eavestone's men tumbled into their two gigs and 

44 



SHIPS WHICH ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

pulled pluckily away from the ship. As soon as 
they came clear of the stern the submarine turned 
her gun upon them, finding their range by trial shots, 
and then shot down the master, the steward, the 
donkey-man, and two seamen. One of the seamen 
was a Baltimore negro named Richard Wallace. 
Thus did Germany punish the lawless wretches who 
had outraged the rules of marine warfare by trying 
to escape from the Prussian rendering of the prac- 
tice of visit and search. Incidentally it may be 
guessed that a little furor Teutonicus possibly en- 
tered into the "incident." I was told that the sight 
of that reeking lifeboat would have turned a man's 
stomach. 

I^ow a further serious quaere arises. Conceding 
that the right of flight from submarine attack is an 
elemental and indubitable one, does the merchant 
ship have any further rights in its encounters with 
these self-appointed custodians of international good 
usage? If it be wrong and unlawful for the sub- 
marines to set non-combatants afloat on the treach- 
erous ocean wastes, as I hope to show in discussing 
our fifth general division, must it not be right and 
lawful for the intended victims to save themselves 
not merely by flight but by active resistance? Eor 

45 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

unmolested desertion to the elements is the very best 
that these victims can anticipate — a bare chance for 
life. And in many cases — vide section 4 — they face 
actions which would make De Quincy yearn to re- 
write his famous essay on Murder as a Fine Art. 
In fighting against the U-boats they are therefore 
unquestionably fighting for their lives; and self- 
defense has spelled exculpation since mankind framed 
codes of justice and graved them onto stone before 
the earliest dawn of human history. 

But Admiral Von Tirpitz and his satellites have 
had a different view. To their minds the fact that 
a freight ship has been guilty of fiendishly mounting 
a little gun for self-defense, and wickedly trying 
to use it when the U-boat undertakes its benign work 
of shelling the crew into lifeboats for abandonment, 
places that ship wholly outside the pale of common 
human considerations. If a vessel carries a gun the 
submarines feel freed from any vestigial notion that 
her occupants are fellow-men! 

Take the case of the East Wales. This steamship 
of less than three thousand tons register was attacked 
by shellfire from two German submarines at six 
o'clock in the morning in moderate autumn weather 
in October, 1917. She mounted a defensive gun 
aft; and proceeded to make a gallant Fabian fight, 

46 



SHIPS WHICH ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

handling her weapon so smartly that her pursuers 

kept their distance. In fact one of them presently, 

"Bethought herself and went, 

Having that within her womb which had left her ill content." 

At least so we hope. But the other U-boat even- 
tually proved to he too much for the merchant fight- 
ers. Under a steady grueling fire they gradually 
succumbed. Two of their lifeboats were shot away, 
and it became the part of wisdom to abandon the 
ship before the other boats were destroyed. 

Here was the German opportunity magnanimously 
to recognize a gallant foe after he had been van- 
quished. And the Prussians lost no time in doing it, 
- — in their own happy manner. They circled raging 
about the lifeboats and fired into them with the ut- 
most malice, killing two men and wounding seven. 
One of the murdered men was James Dawcy Fringer, 
a twenty-two-year-old boy from Roanoke, Virginia. 
The upper part of his person was shot wholly away ; 
so that his bloody abdomen and legs remained sitting 
in the boat, and had to be pitched overboard. 

You can see for yourself that these paladins of 
maritime chivalry do not propose to brook the gross 
affront of being fired upon by victims just because 
they are trying to kill the latter or force them into 
lonely o^u boats. They are quite clear, you can 

47 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

see, that when your enemy sets out to take your 
coach-and-four and valuables and leave you maimed 
and naked on the moors, if you try to resist him he 
has a right to shoot you dead into the bargain. 

As has been stated, however, these cases are far 
from constituting the whole campaign, even against 
small ships; for there have been many very quietly- 
conducted assaults, especially during the earlier 
stages of the war. All in all I should hazard the 
estimate that in one-half of all the attacks against 
the class of vessels now under discussion the guilt 
of the submarines has been confined solely to the 
abandonment of the lifeboats. 

The ordinary course, when the submarine stops 
shelling upon the surrender of her quarry, is for 
the Germans to conmiandeer a lifeboat to send a 
boarding party to loot and bomb the ship. The 
boats are ordered alongside the submarine and a 
portion of their crews taken off. The remainder are 
then compelled to row a detail of submarine men 
back to the vessel. The boarders carry sacks, and 
often plunder the ship systematically, taking away 
tobacco and concentrated foods such as bacon, cocoa, 
and sugar. In most cases they appropriate the ship's 
nautical instruments. In a few cases, such as that 

48 



SHIPS WHICH ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

of the Solstadj they have not disdained to pilfer the 
forecastle bunks, stealing the watches and small 
money from under the mattresses of the boys who 
rowed them aboard. Doubtless they feel that their 
compassionate abstention from shelling these par- 
ticular victims is deserving of some trifling tangible 
recognition. 

The bombs used are of various descriptions. An 
overside cubical bomb, with one face made very 
thin to be set against the hull of the vessel, has 
been several times reported. Since this type of 
bomb explodes two and one-half feet under water, 
with its entire force directed laterally into the ship, 
those who use it can stand on the deck and look 
down to see the effect when they touch it off. An 
American o£Scer serving on a British freight ship 
was allowed in this way to detonate the three bombs, 
electrically wired together, which sent his ship to 
the bottom; and the Norwegian master of the 
Storenes had a similar experience. 

Rather more common are the types of bomb de- 
signed to be planted in the ships' interiors, to be 
exploded by time-fuses. The bombing party can 
easily allow themselves opportunity to get clear of 
the ship before the explosions. These bombs are al- 
most as poor in results as the shellfire; for very fre- 

49 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

quently the latter has to be invoked, along with tor- 
pedoes, to finish off ships which have already been 
bombed. I recall one staunch down-east American 
sailing ship, westward bound in ballast, which had 
two German bombs exploded in her empty hold with- 
out any apparent effect at all. The concussion ap- 
peared to squander itself impotently in the vacancy 
and against the stout Maine ship-timbers. 

Lumber-laden sailing-ships, themselves constructed 
out of wood, proved by no means easy to sink; and 
the little pitch-pine carriers from our southern states 
must have been considered by the submarines as 
unmitigated nuisances. The fact that they never 
sought to escape or resist was more than offset by the 
prodigious floating capacity given them by their solid 
cargoes and well-lashed deckloads of timber. Some- 
times the Germans tri^d the plan of shelling such 
ships at close range until they should heel over^ then 
leaving them to be broken up by the action of the 
seas. Often, as in the case of the Heathfield, the 
boarding parties scatter inflammable oil or set in- 
cendiary bombs, and the ship may be seen burning 
for two or three days by the crew in their open boats. 

I must not conclude the treatment of attacks upon 
unarmed and slow vessels without making the obser- 

50 




CopyrigJit hy International Fihn S^y-nce 

Abandonment of a sinking vessel. 



[Page 50] 



SHIP. v^HICH ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

ration that no victim has been too humble or small 
to engage the attention of the submersibles. They 
had no false pride to prevent, for example, their 
destruction of the John Hays Hammond, a Grand 
Banks sailboat from Gloucester, Massachusetts, of 
less than one hundred tons register. This saucy 
little American craft came across the Atlantic un- 
der cargo, and lay for some days at Queenstown 
while the Consulate was adjusting a dispute between 
her owners and her complement. She intended to 
proceed from England to Iceland, and it was presum- 
ably on the bleak voyage to Reikjavic that she was 
snapped up by the omnivorous TJ-boats. 

The attacks by submarines against fishing-boats 
have become notorious. During my stay at Queens- 
town, Germany was still trying to bolster up the 
fiction that she was "not at war with the Irish," 
and accordingly the submarines did not murder any 
Irish fishermen. Toward the last, however, they 
did execute one brilliant action against the fishing 
fleet off old Baltimore in the County Cork, and 
^heir intrepid enterprise was crowned with a vic- 
tory having a luster all its own. Eleven gasoline 
motors were destroyed, and the boat containing the 
leading fisherman was towed twelve miles out to sea 
and cast off at twilight with a single pair of oars. 

51 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARi .iE 

Can you imagine an American naval officer carrying 
out a movement so loftily conceived! Later on, so 
the press informs us, the submarine raids against 
Irish fishers have become just as murderous as those 
against the English fleets working out of Lowestoft, 
Grimsby, and Yarmouth. 



CHAPTEE ly 

SHIPS TOEPEDOED WITHOUT WAENING 

In taking up our second group of subject-matter, 
the attacks upon freight steamers of fairly good size 
and speed, it may be said first and foremost that the 
larger the ships the more apt is the submarine to 
remain submerged and use a torpedo without warn- 
ing. The Germans assert that they have been con- 
strained into this policy because the better class of 
freighters carry guns. If they tried to give fair 
warning, they protest, their submarines would be fired 
upon and sunk by the very people for whose safety 
they were showing consideration. 

This is a strong plea, with a compelling verisimil- 
itude ; for every one knows that very many merchant 
ships do mount guns and are resolute to use them 
upon opportunity. In October, 1917, our Govern- 
ment declined to grant clearances to sailing-ships 
bound for the danger zone ; and we may assume that 
slow ships are also kept out of the zone unless they 
are under convoy or are equipped with armament. 

53 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 



I 



In assaying this contention for its percentage of 
genuineness, however, we are aided by turning to 
the numerous instances of submarine attack whicK 
occurred in the early days of the campaign. In 
those days the freight ships had not yet commenced to 
carry guns, or were just commencing to carry them. 
Yet torpedoes were repeatedly used by the subma- 
rines without the faintest warning against ships 
which not only were unarmed but which the TJ-boats 
must have known or presumed to be unarmed. The 
most cursory glance at the evidence in the early cases 
shows this, and naturally many later cases can be 
cited. 

To say nothing of the defenseless passenger 
ships which were sunk without warning — the I/usv- 
tarda, Arabic, and others — we have the cases of the 
Manchester Engineer, Storstad, Delamere, Caim- 
hill, Storenes and Hesperides; and by a little digging 
I could give many more names of ships having no 
armament yet bushwhacked without forewarning. In 
each of these instances there were sufficient daylight 
and calmness of the sea so that the submarines could 
scrutinize their prey and note the absence of guns. 
It is a moral certainty that in a large proportion 
of these instances the submersibles had appraised 
their prospective "kills" before striking, and knew 

54 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

of the absence of weapons. Yet thej deliberately 
elected to launch their missile in silence, a dagger- 
thrust in tbe backs of their victims. Why, even a 
rattlesnake sings before it strikes! 

And even after the practice of mounting guns be- 
came more common, there have been cases just as sig- 
nificant in showing the German determination not 
to warn unarmed ships. For such ships, namely, 
ships carrying no armament, have been torpedoed 
without warning under weather conditions so favor- 
able that the submarines could easily note, and must 
have noted, the defenselessness of their targets. The 
Bromport freighter Delamere, steaming between 
Goree-Dakar, West Africa, and Liverpool, laden witK 
rubber and palm oil, carried neither gun nor wireless 
equipment. Yet she was torpedoed, in the spring 
of 1917, at eleven o'clock in the morning, one hun- 
dred and twenty miles from the Kerry coast, with- 
out a hint of premonition. She sank in seven min- 
utes, with a loss of ten lives. The steamship nes- 
perides, of two thousand one hundred and four tons, 
bringing maize from Buenos Aires, was not armed 
in any way. Yet she was torpedoed in fair weather 
at half past five o'clock in the evening last April 
without any forewarning whatsoever. She was two 
hundred miles west of the Fastnet at the time. The 

55 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

chief engineer was killed by the ensuing boiler ex- 
plosion. 

In both these cases, self-evidently, the iron sharks 
had all the opportunity in the world to study the 
situation before unleashing their death-bolts. In 
fact no special pains were needed, for the most ordi- 
nary care would have enabled the Germans to warn 
their quarry. In both cases, it may be said in pass- 
ing, the submarines callously catechized the sur- 
vivors in their open boats, and left them without any 
offer of aid. 

The truth is that even at their best the subma- 
rines are never willing to take the least chance that 
their victims may escape. To use a homely and forc- 
ible Saxon phrase, these outlaws are so hell-bent upon 
driving through their successes that they will not 
even take the trouble to examine whether it is feas- 
ible for them to be humane about warnings. It is 
doubtless true that they have a wholesome fear of 
gunfire, but far stronger is the dread that they may 
miss some victim. It is not apprenhensiveness lest 
they be fired upon which leads them to skulk up and 
assassinate a good ship in foul silence, so much as ap- 
prehensiveness lest that ship escape them if they 
give her any chance to get up speed. They have 
their choice of giving decent warning with the prob- 

56 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

ability of getting their prey, or of not giving warn- 
ing with the certainty of getting her. And the mil- 
lion-fold gi*eater humanity of the first-named course 
has evidently no weight against the slightly increased 
effectiveness of the second. For the difference be- 
tween probability and certainty they are ready to 
sacrifice any amount of human life ! We may with- 
out pride, surely, be confident that an American sub- 
marine would take a chance on fighting fair, even 
at a little greater risk to itself and a slightly smaller 
chance of clutching an extra success. 

Here is another angle: Devices for giving warn- 
ing without exposing the submarine to counter-attack 
must be easily within the inventive capacity of the 
men who have perfected the modern German Unter- 
seeboot. Even without any such special contrivances 
the submarines are able to play exasperatingly safe. 
Their periscopes barely emerge for a moment or two, 
the composition-glass lenses rising through the sur- 
face as dry as the palm of your hand. The observa- 
tion is taken and the TJ-boat is safe back below be- 
fore there is any rational chance of detection. We 
know — or can deduce it by ordinary common sense — 
that the great majority of the U-boats which are sunk 
are destroyed by war vessels or aeroplanes ; for mer- 

57 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

cliant ships can never, although frequently very gal- 
lant and efficient, take immediate advantage of tran- 
sitory emergence by a submarine — unless their speed 
be doubled. 

It therefore follows that the Germans could at 
small cost in danger or diminished efficiency institute 
ways of letting a freight ship know when they have 
got the drop on her; so as to give her the option, 
at least, of surrendering rather than be blown up. 
Smoke bombs could be used without emergence; or 
blank torpedoes, to strike with noise but not force, 
could be fired as a signal that other and deadly tor- 
pedoes would follow immediately unless the engines 
were stopped. Certainly means could be found if 
the will existed. But the Prussian naval gentlemen 
do not have the will. On the contrary they have 
from the outset seemed actually to prefer the fic- 
tional belief that all merchant ships are armed, and 
that armed merchant ships are always desperately 
dangerous. 

If the Germans had originally put forward this 
armament excuse at a time when many freight ships 
really were carrying guns they would have had a 
strong case. But they were pumping this plea, with 
full tremolo effects of the "more-in-sorrow-than- 
wrath" variety, long before one merchantman in a 

58 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

half-dozen bore armament. The argument was an 
empty and impudent pretext at the time it was first 
fabricated to cloak a shark's-appetite for victims. 
The fact that circumstances have since changed to 
give it more color should not lead us astray. For 
the truth of the matter is that the Germans deter- 
mined to sink any and every ship on sight, and to 
do their work free of any "sentimental" warnings 
which might embarrass the triumph of their cause. 
That truth is just as real to-day as it was three years 
ago. The presence of guns on board a freight ship 
is almost irrelevent and a matter of indifference so 
far as submarine success is concerned ; but it makes a 
good dialectic point for expostulation. 

In connection with this question of devising means 
of warning it should be noted that there has never 
been a glimmer of evidence that the Germans have 
even studied the problem. !N^o one of the hundreds 
of ships which have been torpedoed has ever thought 
that she saw or heard anything which might be 
a German experimental device for warning. !No 
stories have ever come out from Germany of invent- 
ors laboring to introduce humanizing devices for the 
submarine, either to give warning or otherwise. 
Would this have been true if America had been us- 
ing submarines for three years? 

59 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

I also urge that the German attitude as to warn- 
ing either armed or unarmed ships he read in the 
light of their attitude on the cognate questions of 
shellfire, desertion of lifeboats, and the like. Courts 
of law take the general character of a culprit into 
consideration in passing upon his specific extenuat- 
ing pleas. 

If any reader still has a haunting misgiving to 
the effect that, "The Germans cannot he expected to 
jeopardize their own lives in order to spare the lives 
of others" — which is a mighty poor sentiment 'per 
ipse, so far as that is concerned — let him ponder 
those last two paragraphs well. I was recently in- 
formed reliably that the average educated man in 
Germany actually uses as an apology for submarines 
the statement that they are no worse than mine- 
fields; with the implication, first, that international 
law has sanctioned the use of mines against mer- 
chant ships, and second, that to the German mind 
there is nothing monstrous in such a use of mines. 
On the first point the fact is, of course, that mines 
have never been used indiscriminately in the open 
sea. The second point is highly interesting and 
pertinent for the ugly light it throws upon the Ger- 
man general state of mind. If any plan for slaugh- 
ter can exist more insusceptible to being human- 

60 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

ized or mitigated in its operations than the use of 
promiscuous mine-fields scattered casually about the 
open ocean, I defy any German sympathizer to name 
it. To say that the warningless use of torpedoes 
is no worse than mine-laying is like saying that 
murder is no worse than parricide. Let us examine 
how this German practice works out. 

A fair hit by a torpedo is apt to sink a ship in 
remarkably short order. There are very many cases, 
it is true, in which the vessels float for quite a time ; 
and it is these instances which yield the numerous 
anecdotes and the occasional photographs from which 
many people draw their impression of submarine 
attacks. Nevertheless such instances, if the Queens- 
town criteria are trustworthy, are the exceptions 
rather than the rule. I believe that at least one- 
half of all ships struck by a torpedo without warning 
sink within the space of ten minutes or less. 

A Cork packet-boat, the City of Bandon, torpe- 
doed without warning at ten o'clock on a bleak win- 
ter night, sank in sixty seconds, with a loss oi all 
but four out of her complement of thirty-two men. 
Her sister ship, the Ardmore, also torpedoed without 
warning, sank instantaneously, with a loss of all but 
one single member of her crew; and recent press 

61 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 



a 



dispatches state that two other Irish packets have 
been sunk without even a single survivor. The 
Richard de Larrinaga sank in three minutes, with the 
death of thirty five out of her forty-eight occupants. 
Seven Americans died from this outrage. The Lovj- 
well sank in one minute, and twenty-one out of her 
complement of thirty-one persons were drowned. 
The Minnehaha sank in six minutes, with forty- 
three deaths. The Bamton sank in thirty seconds, 
with fourteen men lost and nine saved. The Amer- 
ican tank steamer Montana was torpedoed without 
warning on July 31, 1917, and sank in one minute, 
with a loss of twenty-four lives. 

The first officer of the Famham, with his arm 
in a sling, told me how his late vessel had been 
torpedoed in fair weather, with other ships close 
at hand, but had gone down so swiftly — in two min- 
utes — that only eight out of her crew of twenty- 
three persons ever reached the surface of the sea! 
The Famham was an old ore-carrying tramp, home- 
ward bound under cargo from Biserta, Spain. The 
torpedo and boiler explosions burst her hull clean 
in two amidships, so that the bow and stern folded 
toward one another like the blades of a jackknife. 
The sections rushed beneath the sea like lead; and 

62 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

carried down the hardy seamen like imprisoned ver- 
min hefore they could even reach the decks. 

This kind of cases could be adduced almost indefi- 
nitely, and the examples given are absolutely typical 
of a large section of the submarine victories. The 
merchant crews often work real miracles in saving 
themselves from ships which practically vanish be- 
neath their feet, as in the cases of the Karuma, Tela, 
and Thistleard. But despite these cases, and the 
many cases in which the ship stays afloat for a con- 
siderable time, the general result of torpedoing a 
ship without notice is that she sinks so immediately 
that many of her occupants have not even a gam- 
bler's chance to save their lives. 

If your adversary draws a revolver and fires it 
at you I suppose the chances are really only about 
one in three or four that his shot will kill you. He 
is more apt to miss you or to wound you. Yet jur- 
isprudence maintains that your death would be a 
"natural and probable consequence" of his act, and 
he is held legally accountable pursuantly. 

^ow it is undeniable, even when every concession 
has been made, that the instant destruction of a vic- 
tim-ship and her non-combatant crew is a "natural 
and probable consequence" of firing a torpedo with- 
out warning. So that no legal canons have ever been 

63 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

framed under which such an act, with malitia prae- 
cogitata, does not constitute plain murder, and mur- 
der in the first degree. And if the apologist points 
out that all war is murder, let him note that in civ- 
ilized war the murder has never been planned and 
executed against inoffensive and helpless laboring 
men and civilians. 

On the sea-floor at the bottom of the broad tract 
of sea known as the South Irish Channel there are 
lying several thousand corpses of murdered seamen; 
and if some of these poor fellows could be vouch- 
safed a few moments' resuscitation to come dripping 
into our Consulate with their stories we could know 
just what it means in murder to slip a death-bolt 
into a merchant steamer without warning. Short 
of that we shall never get direct testimony as to how 
the deaths transpire. 

I cannot give, of course, details as to how these 
victims died. But our imaginations cannot lead us 
far vsrrong. We can see a group of deckhands or 
stokers, including farmer boys from Tennessee and 
pavement-bred boys from I^Tew Jersey, off watch 
in a cramped forecastle, vigorously scrubbing their 
hands or laughing over a card-game or honestly snor- 
ing off the effects of their last meal of beef-heart 

64 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

or liver-and-onions. We can hear a sudden explo- 
sion and see the lights go out. The poor chaps start 
up with excited oaths and dash madly down a pas- 
sage to a companion-way. Half-way up the ladder- 
stairs their leaders are sluiced back by a deluge of 
black sea-water. Scrambling and strangling in a 
heap, a few of these boys manage to get a foot on 
the ladder again. One of them, with his face taut 
in that fierce smile which is among our instinctive 
reactions to danger, forces his way, lifting one leaden 
foot after another, almost to the hatch. He is 
thinking clearly just how he will seize the hatch- 
way and free himself to shoot upward to the face 
of the sea. And then, just while his purpose is most 
lucid, his face undergoes a curious relaxation, and 
his leaden feet cease to bother his mind any more. 
In another instant he is sliding quietly back among 
the quiet huddle at the foot of the companion-way; 
and presently he and his comrades have found, by 
the swirling of the water, that last posture, doubled 
upon the steel floor or slumped wisely into the corner 
of a door, in which they are spending the rest of 
the interval between the Great German War and 
God's eternity. Somewhere between them and the 
surface are the corpses of their bunk-mates Billy 
and Slim and Charlie Jackson. Billy had had a 

65 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

wild piston-rod driven through his skull; Slim was 
pinned into the scuppers by a rolling oil-barrel; and 
Charlie Jackson broke both his forearms when the 
after yard swung to port, so of course he couldn't 
swim but a minute or two. ^ * * * Back home 
in Dubuque or East Orange a mother finds herself 
sitting bolt upright in her bed, from a nightmare 
about one of her boys. 

Eor the dangers attendant upon wamingless tor- 
pedoing are by no means confined to actual drown- 
ing from the sudden engulfment of the ship. In at 
least one case out of every three, to begin with, 
there occur boiler explosions. If the submarine 
makes good shooting the torpedo strikes amidships 
and induces an engine explosion with fatalities more 
horrifying than those from shellfire. I saw the mag- 
nificent Scotch chief engineer of the Salmo fright- 
fully scalded about the head and torso; and when 
I left Queenstown he was said to be dying in agony 
at the Civil Hospital there. In a score or more of 
cases I listened to the most sickening stoke-hold sto- 
ries of how brave men, frequently Americans, were 
blown into ribbons or boiled to death in live steam 
from bursting pipes. In the Gafsa case seven men 
were killed in the engine-room, and in the case of the 

66 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

Camara nine men were annihilated by the explosions. 
Similar death records, some greater and some less, 
resulted from the cases of the Turino, Folia, Nor- 
wegian, San TJrbana, Marina, Feltria, Snowdon 
Range, Cymric, Gibraltar and Memnon. 

These boiler explosions, contrary to a fallacy cur- 
rent among seamen, are not caused by the sudden 
immersion of the hot boilers in the cold water of the 
sea; for this contact has only a tendency to reduce 
the steam pressure. They are caused either directly 
by the concussion of the torpedo or its explosion, or 
indirectly by mechanical vagaries of machinery dis- 
located by the torpedo explosions. 

A typical case is that of the Vedamore, a John- 
son freight liner which was torpedoed without warn- 
ing under a setting senescent moon just before dawn 
in a heavy sea in February, 1917. She sank in five 
minutes with a loss of twenty-five lives out of fifty- 
seven. The boilers exploded and wiped out almost 
the entire engine-room watch. Between ten and 
thirteen Filipinos and two American negroes were 
dismembered and destroyed in a manner too revolt- 
ing for the mind to dwell upon. 

Parenthetically I must tell you the story of the 
single person who survived from the engine-room 
of the Vedamore. He was a grizzled little Filipino 

67 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

stoker named Balbino Batiansilo. The force of tlie 
explosion drove him upward through the deck, with- 
out a stitch of clothing, after most of the lifeboats 
had left the dangerous hulk. He swam about until 
he came upon a waterlogged boat, however; and 
remained in this boat, bailing occasionally with his 
hands, without food, water or clothing, in freezing 
weather, until after ten o'clock that night, — a mat- 
ter of eighteen hours. And when the lion-hearted 
little man was brought in to me three days later by 
a brawny Irish police sergeant, he apologized with 
Oriental politeness because his voice was husky in 
answering my questions! I am one of those who 
hope that the American flag, on some basis or other, 
will float over the Philippine Archipelago for many 
centuries. 

The Booth liner Crispin, inward bound from 'New- 
port News, Virginia, to Avonmouth, was torpedoed 
without warning while laboring in a heavy sea on 
a thick March night in 1917 between seven and 
eight o'clock. The impact of the torpedo induced 
a boiler explosion in which five men were horribly 
macerated and killed; and two of these, as well as 
we could establish, were Americans. The Fumess- 
Withy steamship Swanmore, which cleared from 
Baltimore, Maryland, about the time the United 

68 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

States declared war, was torpedoed without warn- 
ing at twilight when she had reached a position two 
hundred miles from the Bull Rock. There were 
eleven deaths, due in greater part to the boiler ex- 
plosion which at once supervened. The ahsence of 
warning may have been revenge, it is true; for the 
Swanmore had managed to sink a submarine a little 
earlier in the afternoon. 

Boiler explosions form only one among the many 
secondary dangers from torpedoes; for the effect of 
dispatching a torpedo against a ship can never be 
foreseen. The missile may, for example, strike 
squarely upon a transverse bulkhead-wall, and jar 
the whole hull from stem to stern, as it did in one 
of the cases I handled. Such a shock causes a pro- 
portion of actual injuries and minor accidents, and 
adds to the fearsomeness of the disaster. Then there 
was a British case, from which the survivors landed 
at Queenstown, in which the torpedoed ship ca- 
reened rapidly over on its side and then turned turtle. 
Many of the occupants were drowned ; but the mas- 
ter and a few hardy spirits crept over the ship's 
rail, so he told our Mr. Heraty, and "climbed east 
while the bottom rolled west" until they found them- 
selves sitting upon the keelson, whence they were 

69 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

eventually rescued. Such cases emphasize the in- 
humanity of launching a torpedo at a ship whose oc- 
cupants have received no intimation of their danger. 

Peculiar perils arise when a victim-ship carries 
hazardous cargo. The Lucilline, a naphtha tank-ship 
bound from ITew York to Calais, was torpedoed with- 
out warning in a heavy swell forty miles out at sea 
at two o'clock in the morning in March, 1917. The 
crew stumbled on deck into dazzling moonlight 
broken by scudding black clouds, only to find them- 
selves immediately stupefied and unmanned by the 
fumes from the riven naphtha tanks. They became 
incapable of handling correctly the falls to the life- 
boats, and displayed every sort of ineptitude induced 
by the "gassing." Only one man died directly by 
asphyxiation — and one from the boiler explosion — 
but twelve more were crushed or drowned by acci- 
dents arising indisputably from their incapacity. 
While the Germans are hardly ever aware that any 
specific ship carries naphtha, they do know that many 
ships bearing volatile oils pass through the danger 
zone and are certain to be among their victims so 
long as no effort is made to ascertain the character 
of the ships assassinated. 

Sometimes, naturally, these tankers are overhauled 
and boarded without any special injury beyond the 

70 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

setting of the crew adrift. In such cases the burn- 
ing of the cargo, which the submarine causes to be 
ignited, makes a striking spectacle. The burning 
of the HeMoria was described to me as having been 
a memorable scene; and so was the burning of the 
San TJrhana. The latter vessel was bound from 
Puerta, Mexico, to Thames Haven, and was of nearly 
four thousand tons register. She was torpedoed 
without warning in April, 1917, at a distance of 
one hundred and eighty miles from land; and four 
men were killed by the boiler explosion. The re- 
mainder of the crew gained their lifeboats in safety, 
and for two days and two nights were able to shape 
their course, they told me, by the pillar of cloud by 
day arxi the pillar of fire by night from their burn- 
ing vessel. 

At one period there was quite a succession of oil- 
carrying ships sunk rather close together both as to 
time and place, near the Irish coast. I was told 
by a gentleman serving in the Volunteer Coast Guard 
that the waves which crisped along the headland 
beaches were iridescent and opalescent from the film 
of oil which covered the ocean. It was even rumored 
that the oil injured the fishing industry for a time. 

The use of repeated torpedoes to dispatch a sink- 
ing ship is not infrequent, and affords one more evi- 

71 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

dence of the utter disregard for life or death with 
which the submarines put through their attacks. 
Two torpedoes were used against very many ships; 
and three in several cases, including the San Urhana 
and the Annapolis. The Terence, which was struck 
at eleven o'clock at night one hundred and ninety- 
three miles southwest of the Fastnet, received no less 
than four torpedoes. But in this case we can happily 
add that the U-boat had good and bitter cause to re- 
spect her adversary, for the Terence had stood her 
off in three separate brushes during the preceding 
day. The Leyland horse-transport Canadian, hailing 
from Boston, was torpedoed without warning at 
eleven o'clock on a bright moonlight night in the 
spring of 1917; and three additional torpedoes were 
sent crashing into her at ten-minute intervals while 
she lay sending up rockets and getting her boats off. 
Any torpedo might have demolished a lifeboat and 
all its complement; and the fact that no casualties 
actually resulted cannot possibly be accounted unto 
the Teutons for righteousness. In the case of the 
Falaha, the reader is doubtless aware, a third tor- 
pedo launched by the submarine in broad daylight 
from within a few hundred yards did strike squarely 
beneath a crowded lifeboat, killing two-score or more 
passengers and seamen. 

72 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

Tlie warningless use of torpedoes, we must re- 
member, is far more than simply a proof of ruthless- 
ness. It is a categorical and insolent repudiation of 
the time-honored formula of the law of nations, that 
''the character and cargo of a ship must first he as- 
certained before she can be lawfully seized or de- 
stroyed," — a principle by which American diplo- 
macy has consistently taken its stand. 

It is abundantly clear that in nineteen cases out 
of twenty, at least, the submarines know nothing 
whatever about the character of the ships which they 
sink without warning; except that from the size 
they can tell whether the victim is a passenger liner 
or not. Even when they are not in any fear of their 
quarry, and emerge freely for the use of gunfire, they 
never take the trouble to learn her nationality, cargo 
or destination before bombarding her. I recall only 
one case — that of the Turino — in which we had any 
respectable evidence that the TJ-boat was apprised in 
advance of the name and voyage of the ship they 
were attacking. Other cases have occurred, no 
doubt, but they are to the last degree exceptional; 
and the Germans have taken pains to advertise them 
unduly with a view to inspiring an undeserved re- 
spect for the efficiency of their Intelligence Service. 

This "hitting blind," without concern as to the na- 
73 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

ture of their victims, does not date merely from the 
1st of February, 1917, when the unrestricted U-boat 
warfare was formally supposed to have commenced. 
As has been already explained, that date did not mark 
any real transition in tactics but only an admission 
no longer avoidable of a change which had already 
been gradually introduced. And certainly in so far 
as any pretense of learning the nature of a ship be- 
fore destroying her is concerned, that feature of the 
campaign has been "unrestricted" from the very first 
day a submarine left Kiel. There is no need to 
furnish any list of ships attacked without knowl- 
edge of or reference to their character and cargo; 
for such a list would include nearly all the vessels 
which have been sunk. 

The sowing of mines in the high seas is perhaps the 
practice which exhibits in purest form the utter con- 
tempt of the German selachians for the character of 
the vessels which they dispatch. We had two or 
three mine cases off Queenstown, outside territorial 
waters. I remember one in which five deaths were 
caused in the stoke-hold. A less tragic incident in 
this case was the wrecking of the galley, where a 
!N"ew England sea-cook saw his range rise up and 
fall asunder while he was himself blown off his feet. 
To name vessels as having been mined instead of tor- 

74 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

pedoed might constitute an admission that the Ger- 
mans could turn to value; but the reader no doubt 
is conversant with some of the instances which have 
been officially announced. There was the passenger 
steamer City of Athens, for example, mined off 
South Africa in the summer of 1917, with the death 
of fifteen passengers. Eive of the dead were Amer- 
icans, and three of them were lady missionaries. 

Before taking up the passenger attacks we ought to 
dwell for a moment upon the splendid heroism and 
capability which many armed merchant ships have 
displayed in fighting off their dangerous assailants. 
I have mentioned the cases of the East Wales and 
the Swanmore, in each of which two submarines fig- 
ured, and in each of which one of the submarines 
was sunk before the gallant steamships were de- 
stroyed ; and there must not be forgotten the case of 
the Terence, the maize ship from Buenos Aires which 
was attacked by torpedo twice and by shellfire at in- 
tervals for ten hours, and was only struck fatally 
late at night after her pursuers had for some hours 
not dared to approach her. One of the two torpedoes 
was a "dud/' or defective, as has not infrequently 
been the case; and one was avoided by a very pretty 
steersman's trick after it had been sighted approach- 

75 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

ing the ship. Then there was the ^ase of the Rovr 
manian Prince, bound from Philadelphia to Plym- 
outh with fuel oil, assailed by a U-boat in April, 
1917. The submarine shelled the ship steadily for 
an hour from a distance outside the range of the 
Roumanian Prince's gun; and then retired, so that 
the plucky ship came clean away. And in the case 
of the Gena, reported by a consulate on the east coast 
of England, two German airplanes succeeded in 
bombing the ship fatally, but one of them was itself 
brought down by the ship's gun almost as the water 
was closing over the gun-crew. 

It is only because the ships which make their es- 
capes rarely happen to be bound to Queenstown, and 
rarely are questioned by any but Admiralty author- 
ities, whatever their destination, that I have had so 
little to say about these "game" and successful en- 
counters. Every week, as the official figures show, a 
goodly number of freight ships beat off submarines, 
and not infrequently sink them. Indeed whenever 
the encounter resolves itself into a running fight, with 
any speed at all on the part of the merchantman, 
the U-boat is apt to be outdistanced. 

There are very practical evidences that the British 
and American Naval authorities are not only proud 
of but satisfied with the efficiency of armed merchant 

76 



SHIPS TORPEDOED WITHOUT WARNING 

ships against submersibles. One evidence is that 
special types of merchant ships are not being con- 
structed for the emergency fleets. Freight ships 
might be constructed, of course, to lie low along the 
water, without superstructures and with internal com- 
bustion engines, so that they could slip through the 
danger zones and hardly ever be sighted. The fact 
that recourse has not been had to this type shows 
how excellently the ordinary merchant ships are felt 
to have acquitted themselves. The keen eyes, stout 
hearts, and ready judgment of our mariners and gun 
crews call for more appreciation than many of us, 
doubtless, have realized. 



CHAPTER y 

ATTACKS OH PASSENGEE SHIPS 

This brings us to the third class of submarine at- 
tacks, the most dumfounding, the most saddening, 
of all. We have seen that the submarines murder 
people who have made surrender, and that they kill 
from behind without a qualm as to the character of 
their prey. But I suppose the ultimate proof and 
manifestation of shark-nature lies in the attacks upon 
passenger vessels. President Wilson's epigram, that 
while property can be paid for, lives can never be 
paid for, applies with even stronger force in the case 
of passenger non-combatants than of seamen non- 
combatants. But more than this, the assaults upon 
passenger ships constitute war upon women and chil- 
dren — there is no other phrase for it — a course which 
since the invention of movable type has been un- 
known among the Caucasian races. 

Tor a parallel to the Lusitania horror, as we knew 
it at the Queenstown Consulate, the mind gropes 
hopelessly through the events of recorded history. 

78 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

The Cawnpore Massacre in India in the Mutiny 
days is perhaps the most horrid crime which ever 
preceded the destruction of the Lusitania; but it was 
perpetrated by a people with infinitely less pretenses 
to civilization than the Germans. The Armenian and 
other unspeakable outrages in the Near East are like- 
wise the work of a race impervious to western stan- 
dards. Of course catastrophes like the Halifax ex- 
plosion or Galveston flood, where the moral element 
is entirely absent, cannot be named in the same 
breath with the German attacks upon our mothers, 
our wives, our sisters and our young children. 

Many persons are ready to condone rough prac- 
tice in warfare between man and man. They carry 
their belief that all is fair in war to such a point 
that when men are fighting and one side begins foul 
play they dismiss the development by according to 
the other side the right to work reprisals in kind. 
But I believe that no man reared in our western 
world, at least, has ever gone so far as to apply 
such a train of thought to actions involving the gen- 
tler half of our race, the loyal and tender ministrants 
who mean so much in this peculiar existence of ours 
on the planet Earth. So that when the Germans 
descend beneath the seventh circle which any at- 
tacks at all upon women must constitute — when they 

79 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

aggravate a crime already execrable by denying any 
warning or any precautions for lif&-saving to such, 
victims — I do not personally see how we can escape, 
while the heavens continue to arch above us, from 
denouncing this abysmal conduct as the consummate 
quintessence of depravity ! 

The Germans themselves even seem to recognize 
tacitly the quality of their deeds in passenger at- 
tacks; for I know of only one such attack, out of a 
large number, in which the U-boats have had the 
hardihood to hail and converse with the lifeboats 
from a passenger ship. On this point the miserable 
creatures have not quite raised themselves "beyond 
good and evil," apparently, for they have enough 
moral cowardice to shrink from facing passenger- 
folk whose nearest relatives they have just done to 
death. 

The first passenger ship attacked after the Lust- 
tania was the Arabic, a popular White Star liner 
sunk off Queenstown on August 19, 1915, with a 
death-toll of forty-seven persons. And let me state 
immediately, and insist upon the point, that neither 
in the case of the Arabic nor in any other passenger 
case whatsoever or wheresoever has there been the 
faintest forewarning on the part of the submarine. 

80 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

At least mj information and belief are strongly to 
that effect. The U-boats have at various times had 
the grace to give warning to every kind of freight 
vessel; but they have never permitted themselves 
to give any notice of assaults impending upon ships 
carrying ladies and children! The German reason 
probably is that passenger ships are so speedy that 
to warn them would be to lose them; so that this 
attitude affords yet another proof that human life has 
no significance to the squalidae when it impedes Ger- 
man naval "glory." 

The Arabic sank within nine minutes after being 
hit, and the limited casualty list is due solely to the 
superb self-control of all concerned. "Isn't it odd," 
said a Queenstown shipping agent to me, "how these 
big fellows go down like rocks almost as soon as the 
torpedoes touch them, while the little tupenny-ha'- 
penny tramps will flounder along quite comfortably 
with two or three torpedoes in their interiors?" 
This observation that passenger ships are the quick- 
est to sink upon being torpedoed is a commonplace 
wherever the submarine campaign extends. Cer- 
tainly there are many instances to support it. The 
Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes, the Arabic in 
nine, the California in ten, and the Minnehaha in 
six, as already stated. Nevertheless I think the gen- 

81 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 






eralization is a little too sweeping. The sudden foun- 
dering of a large ship impresses the imagination more 
than the disappearance of a small one ; but the num- 
ber of augenblicklich sinkings even among ordinary 
small merchantmen is very great. 

The Arabic case brought out the grimmest in- 
stance of Manichean irony against an unfortunate 
mortal which has come to my notice. An American 
business man and his mother were homeward bound 
on the Arabic; and as he chanced to have a penchant 
for pedigreed dogs, he was taking out a pair of Eng- 
lish bulldogs to exhibit at the New York Dog Show. 
When the Arabic was struck he conducted "his mother 
to a lifeboat and left her in the charge of friends | 
and oflScers. Then he went below to save his dogs. ! 
Ten hours later when he came down the gangplank 
at Queenstown, with his dogs under his arms, he 
learned that his mother had been lost! Add that 
to your data on the "Problem of Evil." 

The plight of the living, indeed, in these passen- 
ger cases always stimulated more pity than did the 
plight of the dead. The survivors rather than the 
corpses wrought upon our instincts. A man with a 
crushed limb is pathetic, but a man who has lost a 
little child is beyond conception more touching, we 
thought 

82 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

It was hardly more than a fortnight after the 
Arabic visitation before we had the Hesperian sur- 
vivors on our hands. The Hesperian was torpedoed 
without warning, like the Arabic; and, like the 
Arabic, she was outward bound from the United 
Kingdom. The torpedo struck her at a little before 
eight-thirty in the evening, in fair weather, on Sep- 
tember 4, 1915. It must not escape our attention 
that neither of these two vessels was taking muni- 
tions to England, or even contraband food or stores. 
They were quitting British shores, and virtually all 
that they carried was a little assemblage of inoffen- 
sive human beings. Yet these empty ships were tor- 
pedoed relentlessly at the cost of many lives. It 
seemed incredible at the time. It seemed as though 
there were necessarily some error. Not until many 
months had passed, and instance after instance had 
befallen of assassinating empty outbound vessels, did 
we really grasp that this base practice had been 
from the outset part of a set policy. The duties 
which a raider or blockader owes its victims equally 
under human and divine law the Germans had sim- 
ply spat upon and stamped upon. 

As I look back upon the summer of 1915 it 
seems to me that almost the only progress which I 

83 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE |l 

personally made toward compreliending the truth 
about the submarine campaign was an awakening 
and a deepening of distrust about the German "ex- 
planations" as to any given attack. The Berlin for- 
eign secretary, for example, alleged with egregious 
solemnity that the German commander who had 
sunk the Arabic believed that that vessel was attempt- 
ing to ram his submarine. With regard to the Hes- 
perian, similarly, Count Bernstorff seems to have 
been instructed to assert that she had been struck 
by a mine, not by a torpedo; and perhaps to add 
informally, with rare logical felicity, that anyhow „ 
the Hesperian carried troops. '?{ 

The officers of the submarine which sank the 
Arabic must have been gifted with extraordinary 
judgment as to what constitutes an attempt to ram 
a submarine, for their alleged fright was inspired 
by a ship more than one and one-half miles away 
from them. The submersible in this case was en- 
gaged in sinking the freighter Dunsley, which it had 
attacked at quarter past six in the morning, when the 
Arabic appeared from the east at a quarter to nine, 
proceeding on a course parallel with the coast-line 
at least one and one-half miles further out to sea 
than the Dunsley. The submarine concealed itself 
near or behind the sinking Dunsley, with the hope 

84 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

that the Arabic might approach to give aid. The 
Arabic, however, did nothing of the kind; partly 
because the Dunsley's distress was not very plain at 
that distance, and partly because British ships had 
been instructed not to go near any vessel under at- 
tack by a submarine. The Arabic, zigzagging in a 
gentle two-point zigzag, held calmly to its course, 
which gradually brought it abreast of the Dunsley 
at a distance of nearly two miles. The submarine 
was disappointed to see the Arabic bear straight on, 
farther and farther away from it; and when the 
Arabic was two and one-half points past the Dunsley 
the submarine unleashed its torpedo. The passenger 
ship must have been fully two miles from the sub- 
marine at the time; and even if twenty minutes 
earlier some tack of her zigzag had brought her bow 
for a moment in the general direction of the U-boat 
the latter could not reasonably have had any appre- 
hensions of attack at the time the torpedo was dis- 
charged. 

The undertaking to explain the Hesperian outrage 
as due to a mine-explosion was even less plausible. 
The claim that the mine was an English one, or in 
other words that the British navy was using mines 
along its own coast, was of course simply laughable, 
merely from the standpoint of a priori reasoning, 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE ]|i 

the Germans' own special forte. But the allegation 
that the explosion was caused by a mine at all met 
very promptly with disproof of the most solid and 
concrete kind. For the torpedo which sank the Hespe- 
rian, as has occurred in other cases, left large frag- 
ments of its casing in and upon the ship ; and before 
she sank several of these had been picked up and 
taken into the lifeboats. Captain Main, F. R. G. S., 
is by way of being a bit of a scientist, and it was witH 
scientific care that he preserved these torpedo-shards. 
They were examined with scrupulous care, not only 
by British experts but by American oflScial experts 
at a time when Americi. was trying to be neutral 
even in thought ; and the fact that they are pieces of 
a German torpedo and not of a mine is absolutely 
past any dispute. 

The supererogatory suggestion that the Hesperian 
carried troops was equally grotesque. Among her 
passengers were some thirty or more unorganized 
wounded Canadians, belonging to all varieties of 
military units. They were returning home as in- 
capacitated, and had purchased their tickets individ- 
ually at different times. Troopship, i' faith! The 
Hesperian was a troopship to about the same degree 
as the Lusitania had been a British Naval vessel; 
and I trust you have not forgotten that the Germans 

86 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

had tlie intolerable gall to excuse the Lusitania mas- 
sacre by denominating that reserve ship a British 
Auxiliary IN'aval cruiser. 

As I see it now the Berlin diplomats must simply 
have had a contemptuous faith in the credulous and 
confiding charitableness of the hlodsinige Yankees. 
There really was not one legal scintilla of verity in 
the German "explanations" of the Arabic and Hes- 
perian crimes. As for the precious evidence, or so- 
called evidence, which the Germans fabricated to 
support their excuses in these cases, it is pretty clear 
that the German submarine officers willfully and 
carefully perjured their immortal souls for the sake 
of German destiny — willing to be damned for the 
glory of their Jehovah, as it were. 

These two cases, at least, had the effect of teach- 
ing our Consulate that however one may gasp at 
German fabricated pretexts, such pretexts cannot be 
simply denounced offhand as arrant mendacities. 
In every case it is necessary to place on record 
proper and formal legal testimony about each mi- 
nutest detail. !For it has never been possible to fore- 
see or conjecture just what part of the events would 
be made the point of departure for German extenuat- 
ing claims. Instead of roundly branding these claims 
as being palpable falsehoods we found that we must 

87 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

patiently proceed to accumulate a great weight of 
evidence to hang about Germany's neck, like the Al- 
batross about the neck of the Ancient Mariner, at 
once the symbol and the proof of guilt. 

Eventually the excuse-mill at Berlin slackened 
and ceased its operations, the inner degeneration 
there having reached a stage where the Wilhelm- 
strasse was actually unable to distinguish which acts 
it was expected to be ashamed of. Swollen pride at 
German victories, and gnawing irritation because 
those victories were proving to be apples of Sodom, 
carried Berlin to a pitch such that it no longer 
thought of making apologies or lying excuses to ap- 
pease American sentiment. And thus in the full- 
ness of time there came the Laconia case, which 
stands, so far as I am aware, without the shadow of a 
defense — a raw and flagitious crime whose perpe- 
trators seem dead to any stirrings of honor or dis- 
honor. 

The fine Cunarder, whose destruction is not so 
familiar a story as it should be, was torpedoed on 
February 25, 1917, in rather boisterous weather, at 
half-past ten o'clock at night, without the faintest 
intimation by way of warning. She sounded her 
siren continuously, fired off rockets, and took a stiff 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

list to starboard almost from the moment she was 
struck. The port side of the ship thus sloped out- 
ward, and in the initial confusion several attempts 
were made to lower boats down this projecting side; 
and sad to say 'No. 8 lifeboat was actually so low- 
ered. 

Isolated in its plight, this boat racked and rasped 
its way down the port side ; and being a clinker-built 
boat, it reached the water leaking like a basket. It 
filled with water instantly, but was buoyed up by 
the air-tanks under its thwarts ; and with its nineteen 
occupants drifted away, through the chilling drizzle 
of rain which presently began to fall, coasting the 
giddy twelve-foot ocean swells in the black darkness. 
I dare say that there are German apologists who 
would demand whether this estimate as to the wave- 
depth is an authoritative one, and who would repre- 
hend any meteorological statements not based on read- 
ings of the barometer, the thermometer, or the wind- 
gage. Fortunately, while data of just that sort are 
not available, we do have abundant evidence of a 
somewhat different sort which will demonstrate 
whether the weather and waves were dangerous. 

At half -past twelve in the morning, two hours after 
No. 8 boat set out on its grisly voyage, an English 
business man from Manchester, who had been sitting 

89 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

in tHe bow, very quietly and uncomplainingly col- 
lapsed from exposure and fatigue; and before his 
neighbors recognized the situation he lay a lifeless 
heap in the sloshing water. As the night wore on 
two American ladies near the center of the boat found 
it necessary to stand continuously on their feet, so 
deep had settled the water-logged boat. Even as they 
stood the icy water swirled about their waists. These 
ladies were Mrs. Mary Hoy, of Chicago, and her 
daughter. Miss Elizabeth Hoy. They were originally 
Spokane people, I understand. They were proceed- 
ing to London to join Mrs. Hoy's husband and son. 

At half-past one o'clock gentle gray-haired Mrs. 
Hoy sank down and tucked her head back like a 
tired child, and entered into the last sleep. After 
this Miss Elizabeth Hoy's mind seemed to be un- 
hinged, so Eather Dunstan Sargent and others de- 
posed. She kept chafing the hands of the stiffening 
remains of her mother, and pouring endearments into 
those deaf ears, until an hour later a merciful heaven 
released her overtaxed spirit in its turn. 

And one by one throughout the night the cold fin- 
gers of Death touched these innocent people on the 
shoulder — claiming even a stalwart American negro, 
Tom Coffey — until when the wan dawn suffused the 
winter sea the eleven survivors found themselves ship- 

90 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

mates with eight staring corpses. It had become 
necessary to free the laboring boat from all dispen- 
sable encumbrances, and in the pallid half-light of 
the ocean mists before daybreak the sprawling bodies 
were one by one slid overboard and committed to the 
sea. 

Germany's destiny, we suppose, was thus brought a 
step nearer fulfillment. The submarine commander 
who sank the Laconia proved the one exception to 
my statement that the Germans shrink from con- 
fronting passenger victims. He showed no embar- 
rassment in bringing his vessel alongside a lifeboat 
and demanding particulars as to the voyage, name, 
tonnage, and so forth. And he was surprised and 
manifestly pleased to learn what a prize he had 
drawn. Fearing that he had not heard aright, he 
exacted a repetition a second and third time, for his 
gratification, of the shocking information that he 
had without warning destroyed a passenger ship in 
the dead of a rough midwinter night. He then 
vouchsafed a remark that the British patrols would 
doubtless arrive in due time, and vanished without 
so much as a whisper of inquiry as to the number of 
dead or the condition of the lifeboats. 

For this exploit we cannot doubt that this de- 
natured simulacrum of a man was honored by stand- 

91 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

ing before Wilhelm II at Potsdam and having a 
decoration fastened upon his manly heart. Lieu- 
tenant Schwieger, who sank the Lusitania, we believe; 
received the Iron Cross of the first or highest grade, 
with the Order of the Black Eagle superadded to set 
the seal of Prussia's civilization upon that nauseous 
enormity. 

I have not made an opportunity earlier to men- 
tion that the submarine which sank the Laconia was 
not content with a single torpedo. Twenty minutes 
after the first explosion it sent a second death-bolt 
leaping into the wounded ship, although by that time 
it could not fail to have seen that its victim carried 
passengers. The Laconia was brightly lighted to 
facilitate the taking to the boats. The submarine 
could see that there were people still on the decks, 
but was not by this deterred from firing the second 
torpedo. 

The original explosion had taken place among bales 
of cotton; a fact which explains the slowness with 
which the vessel foundered, — ^nearly an hour. I 
have met Americans who, in their anxiety not to 
wrong the U-boats, were sufficiently soft-hearted and 
soft-headed to credit the submarine with having se- 
lected a part of the Laconia where the first torpedo 
would do slight damage, and with having then waited 

92 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

twenty minutes to give time for debarkation. The 
absurdity of this ascription is glaring. The sub- 
marine had evidently no idea whatever as to the name 
of the ship she was assaulting, and could not pos- 
sibly have aimed at a part of the hull specially capa- 
ble of withstanding the stroke. The dark and misty 
weather, and the roughness of the sea, moreover, 
were such that no commander could have conceived 
or executed the finessing of a torpedo into a rela- 
tively safe section of the ship. The first torpedo was 
aimed to sink the ship. 

The only deducton which the submarine could and 
probably did make before she fired her torpedo was 
that the victim was of liner size. The reader is 
doubtless aware that passenger liners average from 
two to five times as large as ordinary freighters, so 
that even on a dark night a single glimpse will often 
proclaim their character. The submarine which twice 
torpedoed the Laconia did not know what liner she 
was attacking, but probably had noted perfectly well 
that the ship was of liner magnitude. 

The case of the California was of interest chiefly 
in supplying one more plain proof that the Ger- 
mans have no hesitation in sending a passenger ship 
to the bottom without notice. The California was 

93 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

torpedoed in broad daylight under a clear sky at 
twenty minutes past nine on the morning of Feb- 
ruary 7, 1917. The explosion was muffled and 
deadened by the barrels of wax in which the torpedo 
struck; but it was none the less effective for its 
comparative quietness, since the California had com- 
pletely disappeared within ten minutes. 

The submarine in this instance must unquestion- 
ably have sized up the object of its attack accu- 
rately, and known her to be a fast passenger ship with 
a protective gun. The submarine's option then lay 
between attempting to give warning, which might 
or might not mean the escape of the ship, and tor- 
pedoing without warning, which was certain to mean 
considerable loss of innocent civilian life. Between 
these alternatives the U-boat did not hesitate. The 
taking or saving of non-combatant life has evidently 
no relevance in the selachian mind when the success 
of a ship-murder is in the scales. 

After the torpedo had exploded in the California, 
ithe ship's engines could not be stopped or reversed, 
presumably because of flooding; and her momentum 
carried her forward at a pace which made the launch- 
ing of the lifeboats hazardous, and thus accounted 
for the loss of the forty-one persons who were found 
to be permanently missing. The impossibility of 

94 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

stopping a vessel after a torpedo explosion has time 
and again played a deadly part in submarine trag- 
edies. The classic instance, as yon know, is that of 
the Lusitania, from which several hundred of the 
twelve hundred deaths occurred because of the vis 
inertia which carried the great leviathan headlong 
forward at just the critical juncture when the life- 
boats should have been launched. The same thing 
happened in the cases of the Ahosso, the California, 
and many other passenger and freight ships. The 
Calif orma actually forged ahead three-fourths of a 
mile in the brief space between when the first life- 
boat and the last lifeboat quitted her. It may be 
said, on the whole, that in the average passenger 
case there is to be noted a queue or trail of life- 
boats, many of them damaged, and of ejected and 
drowning passengers, strung out along the sea for 
anywhere from one to three miles behind the spot 
where the ship makes her last plunge. 

Most often, perhaps, this inability to take the way 
off a big ship is due to the wrecking of the engines 
by boiler explosions such as have been already de- 
scribed. Or it may be due to the flooding of the 
engine-rooms, as in the case of the Delamere, In 
one case I heard unpleasant hints that an engineer 
had funked the danger of descending to deal with 

95 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

his engines, and that he was afterward conveniently 
drowned. In one or two cases, it was rumored, the 
masters cherished a fatal idea that by maintaining 
the speed of the ship they could keep the sea-water 
from pouring into the aperture as rapidly as if the 
ship were stopped. But in the main the heavy death- 
tolls arising from the momentum of the injured ships 
were due to causes beyond the remedy of the brav- 
est or wisest of officers. I venture the estimate that 
one-third of all the loss of life in the submarine cam- 
paign — at least from passenger vessels — ^has resulted 
from the difficulty and delay which the ships* mo- 
mentum or way has caused in launching the life- 
boats. 

Another passenger liner waylaid and sandbagged 
after her character had been apprehended was the 
Elder-Dempster ship Ahosso, concerning which the 
American public appears to have heard very little. 
This fine vessel at the time of her destruction car- 
ried one hundred and twenty-six passengers, many 
of whom were the wives and children of British of- 
ficials in West Africa. She was coming up from 
the Gold Coast laden with tin ore, cocoa, and palm 
oil; and was torpedoed with not a hint of warning 
at nine o'clock in the evening when three hundred 

96 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

miles off the southwest comer of Ireland. The en- 
gines were instantly put out of control by the ex- 
plosion, and for a full half hour the gallant ship 
plunged hither and thither, yawing and veering er- 
ratically in her extremity like a stricken animal. A 
lovely sunset aftermath still lingered in the west, and 
a crescent moon and evening star were witnesses of 
the pitiful scene. Desperate attempts were made to 
fill and launch the lifeboats; but the anguished ves- 
sel repeatedly smashed and flung off the boats, spill- 
ing and strewing the sea with human beings like 
grains of dust. And when deep night closed down 
over those remote waters, out of the three hundred 
men and women and children who had struggled to 
save their lives nearly one hundred had become 
bits of inert flotsam on the long sea swells. 

But the Ahosso case is further signiflcant, out of 
proportion to its mere numerical additions to the 
records of passenger outrages, because it illustrates 
a German submarine practice of signal and esoteric 
baseness. The Abosso was one of those ships which 
the U-boats have deliberately followed during day- 
light hours and deliberately attacked upon the ad- 
vent of dusk. Unbelievable as it seems, these pol- 
troons have in many instances marked down their 
victims while it was light and slunk furtively behind 

97 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

them until night should descend to cloak the attacks. 
That is to say, they have selected for the moment of 
assault the time when their victims have the worst 
possible opportunities for self-preservation. In ad- 
dition to the Abosso the Germans have used this vile 
strategy against the Hesperian, Tritonian, Feltria, 
Crispin, Canadian, Ainsdale, Hesperides, Annapolis, 
Clan Macaulay, Galgorm Castle; and doubtless many 
others. Who is it that the Scriptures say "love dark- 
ness rather than light" ? 

Just as in the case of so many infamous sub- 
marine practices, the idea that the submersibles 
were intentionally trailing their victims for hours in 
order to strike under the shadows of night crossed 
our minds at first only as an unthinkable suspicion. 
It very soon became a definitely non-ignorable 
hypothesis, and in the end a moral certainty. One 
proof was that the proportion of attacks occurring 
during the early part of the night, according to our 
Queenstown experience, became noticeably large. 
Another was the fact that in many cases ships were 
torpedoed in the evening in weather so misty and 
stormy that it was incredible they should have been 
sighted or picked up by the submarines except at an 
earlier hour. When a vessel is torpedoed on a dark 

98 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

niglit in moderately bad weather, despite her carry- 
ing no outboard lights — not even navigational lights 
— there exists a presumption of which any court of 
law would take cognizance that she has been recon- 
noitered during the day and tracked until darkness 
should shroud the death-stroke. 

The Germans have their excuse, of course. They 
emphasize that the submarines can operate with more 
safety to themselves after nightfall. Like most ex- 
cuses put forward by the inventors of poison-gas, 
this one possesses a quantum of validity absurdly 
incommensurate to the atrocity it is supposed to ex- 
tenuate. The advantage in safety which the U-boats 
gain by deferring their attacks until nightfall is 
trivial in contrast with the increased peril to the 
non-combatant victims. Especially since the sub- 
marines have learned to do their work with high 
effectiveness without ever emerging is their recourse 
to the shades of night for security superfluous. The 
enhancing of their own safety is plainly only a minor 
object; and the principal object is to invoke the ter- 
ror that walketh in darkness, to augment the num- 
ber of fatalities. N'o cauldrons of moral guilt seem 
to outweigh to the Prussians any gain in their pet 
policy of Furchtharkeit. 

99 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

One more passenger case, to exemplify still an- 
other submarine characteristic, must not be omitted. 
The feature in this case is the U-boat hatred of wire- 
less. Their fear of any radiographic communica- 
tion amounts to an aberration. In the presence of 
wireless apparatus they behave with the same des- 
perate nervousness which a woman shows in killing 
a snaJke. Of course when hostile war vessels are 
known or suspected to be within practicable range 
this violent antipathy to wireless is comprehensible; 
but the German interdiction is often enforced when 
there is not even a remote probability that the 
destroyers can come up in time to jeopardize German 
life or German success. So distant is the contin- 
gency of interference that the degree of German 
cowardice becomes too abject to be credited, and we 
suspect that the ban upon radio is due merely to a 
malicious intention that help shall never be forth- 
coming for the abandoned lifeboats. 

The Mantola affair — and that phrase is almost par- 
donable in a case involving only seven deaths — is 
an excellent illustration. The Mantola was a Brit- 
ish-India Line passenger boat outward bound from 
England for the Cape and Calcutta, and was tor- 
pedoed in heavy weather without warning in the 
winter of 1917 when one hundred and eighty-five 

100 



ATTACKS ON PASSENGER SHIPS 

miles off the Fastnet. It so happened that although 
abandoned in haste the ship remained afloat for quite 
a time, and after her survivors had stood by in the 
lifeboats for an hour and a half the wireless opera- 
tor and the chief engineer returned bravely on board 
to send off an S. O. S. call to bring help to the 
women and children. 

But at the first click of the radio key the sub- 
marine, which had evidently been lurking on the 
murky horizon, picked up that message of distress 
and forthwith began a wicked bombardment of the 
derelict, so that the attempt to ask for rescue had to 
be abandoned. There was no rational chance that 
any Admiralty ship would be near enough to 
balk the submarine of its triumph, nor was there 
any other conceivable reason why that cry for succor 
should not have gone out across the sea. We are 
squarely faced with the raw dilemma of whether 
the submarine was simply the most jaundiced super- 
craven ever extant or was black dastard enough act- 
ually to desire that those innocent people should per- 
ish on the sea without help! 



CHAPTER VI 

PEESONAL CONTACT BETWEEN SUBMAEINE CEEWS AND 
THEIE VICTIMS 

OuB fourtH classification of submarine actions 
deals with the conduct of U-boat crews and officers 
toward the crews and officers and passengers from 
the ships destroyed. This demeanor ranges all the 
way from a maudlin and teary sympathy, through 
a shoddy brand of "Made-in-Germany'' courtesy, to 
bluster and bullying, and finally to cruelties which 
would seem to be silly and puerile phantasmagoria 
were they not so revolting and so fatal. Perhaps 
it is a little ill-natured to stigmatize as cheap the 
kind of sympathy and courtesy that the submarine 
men do sometimes show; for the kinsmen of Hans 
Andersen undoubtedly must at times have genuine 
impulses of kind-heartedness. But both sympathy 
and courtesy vaporize instantaneously whenevef 
they seem likely to cost the Germans anything. As 
stated on a former page, I have never learned of 
any instance in which the submarine gave up any 
slightest advantage or put itself to the slightest sub- 

102 



PERSONAL CONTACT 

stantial inconvenience for the sake of a humane act. 
Moreover the cases have shown that it is for the 
Teutons a natural and easy transition from the vent- 
ing of cheap sympathy to the venting of cheap wit. 

The crew of the Oswald, a steamer out of Pen- 
sacola which was sunk last April, were asked their 
destination by the submarine oflScers. Their minds 
reverting to their vanished ship, they said, "We're 
bound for Liverpool." The German officers ex- 
claimed, "What a pity!" and then, "We wish you 
a pleasant voyage!" It was two hundred and fifty 
miles to the nearest land! The affidavit which I 
have before me states, rather woodenly, that this 
jibe was made "sarcastically." 

In the case of the Heathfield the U-boat comman- 
der, with ready jocularity, leered at the survivors 
in the tiny shallop of a lifeboat with the injunction, 
"Take good care of yourselves!" The steamship 
Castilian was sunk by a submarine in half a gale 
of wind, two hundred miles from land, on April 
18, 1917; and the supermen stood by in Olympian 
humor watching the struggles of the survivors, in 
fact openly laughing and jeering at them, so the wit- 
nesses swore. The Terence was destroyed late at 
night in the same month as the Castilian. The sub- 
marine held the Terence's lifeboats in parley to get 

103 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE | 

the facts it wished, and then gave the curt and casual >. 
command, "All right. Now clear out!" The life-- 
boat had one hundred and ninety-three miles to ) 
traverse if it was to reach the land. 

The master's boat from the Delamere was keptt 
alongside the submarine with a gun trained on it for ; 
a considerable time, and then released with the com- • 
mand, "Now pick up your mates. Hurry!" Teni 
of the "mates" perished, and the boat could cer-- 
tainly have saved several of them. The U-boat could 1 
not wait five minutes, even for life-saving, before ; 
getting the details as to its bag. The use of swash- - 
buckling threats "in King Cambyses' vein" is fre- 
quent, and the brandishing of revolvers or training of t' 
guns upon the little open boats is almost universal. . 
The Germans threatened to blow the lifeboats of the ' 
Hatlior out of the water if the master's identity was ^ 
not revealed ; and made the same threat against the 
lifeboats of the Kinross in forcing them alongside • 
the submarine in a sea which seemed certain to crush ] 
them against it like egg-shells. This forcing of boats s 
alongside submarines in rough weather has often 
occurred; and sometimes, as in the case of the 
Eagle Point, insult is added to injury by taunting 
and provocative bearing on the part of the conquer- 
ors. There was a Scandinavian case, whose name II 

104 



PERSONAL CONTACT 

cannot locate, in which the master was given a poly- 
syllabic cursing ending with "Schweinhund" be- 
cause he inadvertently used the English language in 
speaking to the submarine commander. 

This kind of gentle japing could be adduced ad 
naibseam. While perhaps it would be insignificant 
if taken alone, it has a lurid illuminating value if 
taken in connection with the concrete acts of the 
U-boats. And often, as we have seen, it is hard to 
say just when these insubstantial injuries mount 
into the plane of substantial phenomena. In the 
case of the Jose de Larrinaga, a cotton steamer 
hailing from Charleston, South Carolina, twelve 
men were drowned. The submarine hovered about 
the scene without making any motion to assist or 
even to inquire about casualties. Indeed her officers 
actually took photographs of that death-scene to send 
to their fond friends at home ! A similar callousness 
in the interests of amateur photography was shown in 
the case of the Polham Hall, and in at least two or 
three others. The artists in charge of the submarines 
divert themselves with their hobby in entire uncon- 
cern as to the lives of their photographic "subjects." 

In discussing the way lifeboats are treated, how- 
ever, the case of the Cdirnhill stands out pre- 

105 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

eminent. This freighter of over three thousand tons 
register was bound from New York to Havre with 
a general cargo; and at eight-thirty in the morning, 
not long before America entered the war, her chief 
officer sighted a torpedo which approached from the 
starboard beam and passed astern. No warning had 
been received. You will perhaps be shocked to hear 
that the Cairnhill, upon this attempt to knife her in 
the back, proceeded in a very headstrong manner to 
get up increased steam, instead of waiting for more 
of the kind of "visit and search" the submarine was 
about to administer. The CaimhilVs speed rose from 
ten and one-half knots to twelve knots. As soon as 
the submarine realized this violation by its victim of 
international law it emerged, four miles astern, and 
betook itself to overhauling the Cairnhill, firing from 
time to time. Within another twenty minutes it was 
within half a mile of its prey, shelling the defense- 
less ship steadily. Two men on the Cairnhill were 
by this time wounded, and the starboard lifeboat had 
been carried away. It was necessary for fourteen 
men to crowd into the captain's gig, and twenty into 
the port boat. Among the latter were five Amer- 
icans. The wind at this juncture was westerly, with 
a Beaufort velocity of No. 4, or ranging between 
fresh and strong. The surface was a northwesterly 

106 



PERSONAL CONTACT 

'wave action, about No. 5 on the sea-scale, popularly 
described as rough and choppy. 

The U-boat immediately came up to the boats and 
commandeered the large one, placing the occupants 
on its own deck forward of the conning tower, and 
taking the mate a prisoner below into its interior. 
Then the submarine's crew, under regular super- 
vision by officers, entered the lifeboat and deliber- 
ately threw overboard the food, the water, the sails, 
and even the bandana handkerchiefs full of the little 
treasures the poor sailors were seeking to save. To 
put a point upon this hideous jest they actually filled 
the sweet-water cask with salt sea-water! The de- 
scription called before me involuntarily, as I heard 
it, the loathsome tomfoolery of a troop of playful 
orang-outangs. 

While engaged in bombing the Cairnhill, after 
making the master a prisoner, the Germans sighted 
smoke on the sky-line and rightly conjectured that a 
destroyer was in the vicinity. After setting their 
bombs, which they took time to do carefully and 
effectively, they returned to the submarine and went 
below with angry brusqueness. No sooner could 
they close the hatch than the submarine abruptly sub- 
merged, with not a hint of warning, leaving the nine- 
teen men from her deck struggling in a cross sea one 

107 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

hundred and fifty miles from land with that gutted 
lifeboat for their refuge ! So swiftly did the U-boat 
sink that these victims had not even time to dive 
off from the submerging hull. It was in the high- 
est degree probable that the majority of them might 
drown; but by energy, heroism and luck at the end 
of thirty minutes the last man was pulled into the 
boat. 

At the time the CairvJiUVs lifeboat was origin- 
ally gutted, please remember, the submarine had no 
idea that any rescue ship could be expected; and 
even when the warship showed on the horizon there 
was no mortal need for haste in submerging, as is 
shown by the deliberation with which the Germans 
continued to arrange their bombs. 

The facts in this case were sworn to before me 
by five native-born American seafaring-men of ex- 
cellent type, including the ship's boatswain, the car- 
penter and the cook. I know their story to be the 
naked truth and nothing else. 

It has been our personal contact with cases such 
as this which has given me the capacity to credit 
the incredible Belgian Prince facts, as to which I 
have seen the evidence taken by one of the ablest 
gentlemen who has ever held the title of American 

108 



i 



PERSONAL CONTACT 

ConsuL The reader no doubt has read the cir- 
cumstances in the press. The Belgian Prince, out- 
ward bound in ballast to Newport News, Virginia, 
was torpedoed without warning at half past eight 
on an evening in July, 1917, when two hundred miles 
west of Ireland. After the ship had foundered the 
submarine placed her complement of forty-four men 
on board its own whale-backed deck, forcing them 
to take off and throw away their lifebelts. It then 
proceeded away from the scene of the attack, cov- 
ering a distance estimated at some fourteen miles. 
By this time dusk was gathering, even in that north- 
ern latitude; and the submarine plunged suddenly 
beneath the surface — with what thoughts in the 
hearts of her officers God alone knows — and left 
the devoted men of the Belgian Prince to die. 

Well might the Germans believe that this rank 
crime would remain spurlos and unknown, with the 
silent heavens as its only witnesses. But the event 
was to be otherwise. At least three of the victims 
had shown the presence of mind to conceal deftly 
their lifebelts under their coats when herded onto 
the submarine. I say "at least" three because there 
may have been others who died in the sea during the 
night. But at all events when morning came — for- 
tunately it was midsummer weather — there re- 

109 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

mained three men borne up on the ocean maintain- 
ing feebly a precarious spark of life; and a vessel 
passed close enough to see them and rescue them. 

Out of the forty-one men who died four were our 
fellow-countrymen. Of the three men who survived 
one was an unknown Russian, one was a twenty- 
three-year-old Virginia negro named Willie Snell, 
who had been second cook on the lost ship, and the 
third was the chief engineer of the Belgian Prince, 
a man of some attainments and of indisputable 
probity. In the light of other German U-boat per- 
petrations I personally feel justified in considering 
this horrible occurrence as well substantiated as any 
sincere person could ask. 

I will even go one step farther and mention a 
case which I have on hearsay only, from a merchant 
officer. This gentleman assured me that a sub- 
marine was definitely known to have captured a 
steward and his wife and put them through a "third 
degree" examination for information on the sub- 
marine's deck. When they proved intractably loyal 
and silent the Germans submerged suddenly and left 
them to their fate in the water. In consideration 
of its circumstantiality, and of the otherwise proven 
nature of the geniLs squalus in dealing with woman- 

110 



PERSONAL CONTACT 

hobd, this story met spontaneous acceptance in my 
mind, and I still believe it. 

Paymaster Hughes, of the British IN'avy, has heen 
cited as authority for the recent case in which the 
crew of a captured German submarine tried to leave 
British prisoners, bound and gagged, on board to 
drown when her captors left her. 

Since death sentences, with mischievous refine- 
ments, are executed light-heartedly by the U-boats, 
it is not marvelous that they should also resort to 
imprisonment of unoffending civilians. Beginning 
in the summer of 1916, it has become common for 
the submarine to make inquisition for the leading 
officers of each ship sunk. Such officers are then 
taken forcibly on board the submarine, and disap- 
pear from civilized ken. Their disposal is left by 
the Germans to conjecture, because the act is sup- 
posed to strike the other merchant officers into a 
palsy of fear. But even if their treatment consists 
merely in sharing the hospitality extended to other 
prisoners in Germany it is hardly a fate to be idly 
courted. 

The instances in which masters and mates and 
engineers have thus been taken as hostages are very 
nimierous; and to the best of my knowledge and 

111 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

belief the officers of the following ships, among 
others, have suffered capture: Thurso^ Lynfield, 
Saxonian, Penhale, Neath, Belgian Prince, Rowan- 
more, Harpagus, Tunisian, Baycraig, Hathor, Wal- 
lace, Eptalofos, Palm Leaf, ParJcgate and Tremorva. 
Captain Bullock, of the late horse-transport Cana- 
dian, is believed voluntarily to have sacrificed his 
life, by remaining on his bridge when the ship sank, 
rather than to fall alive into the maws of the steel 
selachians. Another master dove overboard, with 
quite a theatric effect, to escape capture ; but the act 
proved unnecessary. The Germans in his case were 
apparently not thinking of hostages; and he was 
picked up safely by one of his own lifeboats. 

In two separate instances, which may best remain 
unnamed, merchant officers have testified to having 
seen, while temporary captives below decks on Ger- 
man submarines, as many as four or five fellow- 
officers of Allied nationality held as prisoners. 
There was a ghastly report strongly current at 
Queenstown, too, that a suffocated German U-boat 
had been raised by the Admiralty from the bottom 
of an Irish cove and had been found to contain, 
among others, the bodies of five drowned British 
masters. True or not, such tales emphasize the stolid 
and obdurate courage of the British mariners, who 

112 



I PERSONAL CONTACT 

continue to sail through, the danger zone without 
ever a sign of fear or even a tacit claim of heroism. 

The objects for this practice of hostage-taking, 
resurrected by the Prussians from the murk of the 
Dark Ages, are threefold. In the first place it is 
supposed to enhance the submarine's immunity from 
attack ; because to sink the submarine afterward must 
entail killing British subjects held captive on board 
it. Secondly, as indicated, it is designed to shake 
and demoralize the seafaring-men who are relied 
upon by the Allies to take ships in and out past the 
U-boats. Thirdly, it has been adopted because it 
does actually deplete to some extent the ranks of 
skilled navigators and engineers available to Ger- 
many's foes. The first and second objects have not 
been accomplished in the faintest degree. The sub- 
marines are as sternly hunted as ever, and the seamen 
of England, France, Norway, Italy and America pur- 
sue their calling without a trace of demoralization. 
Even the third object has given only minimal results, 
in proportion to the vast numbers of trained merchant 
oflBcers in the merchant fleets of the Allies. 

This retrogressive practice of taking hostages at 
sea, of course, has had its counterpart on land in 
the dragonnade of mayors and prominent men in 
Flanders, France and Poland. 

113 



CHAPTEK VII 

LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

IN'ow when the last shot has been fired in a sub- 
marine outrage, or when the assassinated ship has 
been swallowed up in the sea, and when the last 
coarse taunt, or malicious trick, or crime of cap- 
ture or murder is finished — in other words, when the 
Germans finally quit the scene — where are the sur- 
viving victims left? What end do the Germans de^ 
sign for them ? 

They are left tossing in fragile open boats, the 
sport of the ocean and gale, two hundred or three 
hundred or even four hundred miles out upon the 
face of the most cruel body of water in the world, the 
North Atlantic Ocean. The neutral elements of wind 
and sea, ready equally to serve or to injure human- 
ity, are made the involuntary but horrible accom- 
plices of the supermen. 

Let me ask if you have recently been at sea in a 
bad storm ? To the reader who has never lived con- 
tinuously with or upon the ocean it is doubtful if 

114 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

any words can convey the awfulness of the struggle 
which a lifeboat faces when deserted to the mercy 
of the deep. But if you can turn your mind's eye 
back to a recent voyage, and call up the endless 
vistas of heaving waters and the soulless storms 
which battered against your ship when the elements 
unchained themselves, then you will be ready to put 
yourself in the place of submarine survivors, chilled 
and despairing, striving in pigmy desperation against 
the wild might of the Atlantic. You will be ready, 
too, to catch the full meaning of the abandonment 
of lifeboats by the Germans, and to adjudge the pro- 
fundity of their sin. 

Frequently not a single lifeboat ever makes the 
land to tell the tale of loss. A bit of floating wreck- 
age, or an overdue notice posted at Lloyd's in Lon- 
don, remains forever the only evidence of the fel- 
ony. Then again, as in the case of the Highlcmd 
Monarchj cited by Alfred Noyes, only one survivor 
out of an entire crew rejoins humanity with his ter- 
rible story. In the case of the Vienna, which took 
place after I left Queenstown, five spectral and chat- 
tering Chinese were landed as the sole remnant from 
a ship's complement of over thirty souls. I under- 
stand that no coherent account of the assault has ever 
been procured. A ship's officer was still alive in 

116 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

the boat with the Chinamen when they met with 
rescue; but his extreme prostration not being rec- 
ognized, he was allowed to fall into the water, and 
had not strength left to grasp the lifebuoy thrown 
to him. 

It may be laid down as the most moderate pos- 
sible statement from the facts — indeed as an under- 
statement — that German submarines have never ab- 
stained from attacking a ship because of weather 
conditions imperiling the occupants. They pro- 
ceed with subhuman imperturbability to put 
through their so-called duty irrespective of whether 
the lifeboats will be left on a tranquil sea or in a 
midnight whirlwind. The proportion of attacks 
made during tempestuous weather to the total num- 
ber of attacks is at least in even ratio with the pro- 
portion of such weather to the weather in general. 
The assaults are made with the grimmest indiffer- 
ence to inclemency which promises death for the 
crews of the victim-ships. 

The big barque Inverlyon was attacked by the 
Teutons in a sea so high that the port lifeboats could, 
not be launched at all ; and the men stepped from the 
ship's deck directly into the two starboard boats as 
the latter were swung upward on the foaming wave- 
crests. Only one of the Inverlyon's boats ever 

116 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

reached the land. The Bowanmore was subjected to 
a scorching gunfire, and her crew thus coerced into 
the lifeboats, in October, 1916, during a storm so 
violent that the wave-troughs ranged from fifteen to 
twenty feet in depth. The master was taken hostage 
at the point of a revolver. The Bowanmore was un- 
armed ; but fortunately she carried radio equipment, 
and was able to use it to bring prompt assistance. 
The British barque Bavenhill was bombarded vi- 
ciously fifty miles out at sea in wild April weather. 
Only one lifeboat could be launched. Its occupants 
struggled with the hurricane for forty hours, and 
were then saved. The Ainsdale was attacked at a 
distance of one hundred and eighty miles from land 
in a tempest so bitter that although the lifeboat was 
adrift only ten hours two of its men were stark dead 
from exposure before help arrived. In the case of 
the Cyrene nine men died of exposure out of twelve 
after eighteen hours in a waterlogged boat. The 
storm in which the American oil-tank ship Vacuum 
was sunk was so severe as to kill eleven out of four- 
teen occupants of one boat in only eighteen hours of 
exposure. 

The fine freight-ship Feltria was struck by a tor- 
pedo without warning under terrific weather condi- 

117 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

tions just before dusk in the spring of 1917, and sank 
in ten minutes, with, four deaths from the boiler 
explosion. The land was only ten miles distant, but 
in that tempestuous sea it might as well have been 
ten thousand. The lifeboats congregated together 
for mutual aid and comfort as the night descended. 
Throughout the hours of darkness the long Atlantic 
combers charged ever and again through that little 
cluster of cockle-shells, occasionally flipping one 
lightly over; until when daylight came only twenty 
men remained alive on the scene. The original crew 
had numbered seventy-three! The submarine had 
talked with one of the boats before leaving them, 
expressing regret; and had aided a swimming officer 
to gain a lifeboat. This is one of the boasted cases of 
courtesy. The courtesy did not prevent fifty-three 
men from being slain by those who were courteous. 
Such sporadic acts of good-heartedness as have ap- 
peared in the submarine wastes of crime strike me, 
I am frank to say, like freak rose blossoms blowing 
in December, sterile and unfragrant reminders of a 
summer sadly done and gone. Whether genera- 
tions must be plowed under before the German roses 
of warm-heartedness can bloom again we cannot 
know. 

The Gcdgorm Cattle, a big maize sailing-ship 
118 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

from the Argentine, was shelled by a submarine in 
February, 1917, seventy-four miles southwest of Bull 
Rock, just as night was falling. The shelling ceased 
when the lifeboats got clear. The weather consisted 
of a heavy sea, breaking, a misty rain, intense cold, 
and a southwest gale so strong that it had been driv- 
ing the heavy and deep-laden old craft along at nine 
knots per hour. At the first shot of the submarine 
the Galgorm Castle clewed up its mainsail and cut 
the halyards to its topgallant The U-boat could not 
possibly have failed to note these actions or failed 
to interpret them as surrender. Yet it maintained 
its shellfire so virulently that the crew tumbled into 
the lifeboats in that howling storm without daring 
to take time to stock them with provisions. The 
master's boat had its rudder broken in the exigent 
haste, and had to put off into the tempest in that 
condition. 

The results were only precisely one-half as bad as 
was to be anticipated ; that is to say only one of the 
boats perished. The master's boat was saved on the 
following day, and two fine American young men 
were among its occupants. They told me that Cap- 
tain Frampton, the seventy-two-year-old skipper, and 
his wife who accompanied him, were both ardent 
Methodists ; and that they not only labored with cool- 

119 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

ness and heroism but also lifted up their voices ii 
prayer very fervently and audibly throughout that 
night of wrack and stress. The fact that the mate's 
boat, although it had the advantage of good steering- 
gear, was never heard from again, and must have 
been overwhelmed in the sea, makes the Captain's 
rescue a colorable instance of response to trust in 
Providence. 

Two Americans were lost in the mate's boat. One 
was the runaway son of a New York business man, 
a boy of nineteen years, notable for his height of six 
feet and four inches. The other was a yellow negro 
from Stannardsville, Virginia, whose widow and lit- 
tle orphaned pickaninnies have the Prussian destiny 
to thank for their present condition. The death of 
the men in that boat ought to have been seen so 
that it might have been described. Just how their 
anxious faces confronted the blackness and bleakness 
of the storm, just how they relieved one another at 
bailing and steering, and one by one dropped down 
or were washed over and away, or how their boat 
never rose out of the cavernous hollow of some 
monster wave — all this we can imagine but not 
know. And the human beings who had willed and 
effectuated this horror, we suppose, had submerged 
after their evening's work into the calm levels below 

120 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

the storm to their evening's food and phonographs 
and sleep. 

The cotton steamer Towergate, a little tramp com- 
ing up from the Gulf of Mexico, — I met her brokers 
at Galveston a few weeks ago, — was assailed by gun- 
fire in rough weather at four o'clock on the after- 
noon of an April day in 1917 ; and under the stimulus 
of a couple of shrapnel shells near the boats the crew 
were able to get away in seven minutes. The sub- 
marine proceeded to destroy the Towergate, and then 
came up to the lifeboats, at about half-past five 
o'clock, apparently merely to give them a looking- 
over. Her conning tower was badly disguised with 
two small lug sails. She did not hail the boats. She 
left them alone on the ocean two hundred miles from 
land. 

The two lifeboats naturally strove to keep to- 
gether; but the weather frustrated the attempt, and 
hy daybreak on the next morning, Tuesday, they had 
lost sight of one another. The mate's boat was never- 
seen again, and must have been capsized or foun- 
dered with all hands. The fifteen occupants of the 
master's boat made a notable and noble fight for life. 
The violence of the storm mounted steadily through- 
out the day, and during that night the boat staggered 

121 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

panting and tugging at a double-drag sea-anchor 
made of buckets. On Wednesday just before dawn 
the wind eased off. By eight o'clock they had the 
sail up and were lurching dizzily toward the land. 
Thursday morning was perilously rough again, and 
they gave themselves up for lost. But their bow rose 
to meet every billow, and late in the day the sea 
subsided. At nine o'clock that night, more than three 
days and three nights after their desertion, riding 
out the long black swells, they caught the glimmer 
of a lighthouse — the Blasquets Light — and with one 
accord lay down exhausted in the bottom of their 
boat Morning found them still inert and powerless, 
broken by the long-drawn strain, although the land 
was within a dozen miles. It was two o'clock in the 
afternoon when by a kindly chance they were sighted 
and saved by a trading tug bound down from the 
north into Limerick. 

I reached Limerick the next morning within an 
hour after they had awakened from the heavy sleep 
into which they had fallen upon their arrival. Five 
of them were Americans. I shall never forget their 
appearance or the appearance of their British com- 
rades. Haggard, unshaven, with wasted cheeks and 
with dark circles under their eyes, their bones seemed 
starting through their unspeakably bedraggled cloth- 

122 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

ing. They spoke in hoarse half-voices to tell me of 
their late companions. Some of the dead men, too, 
had been fellow-countrymen of ours, nourished by 
our sun and soil, and dowered with the fresh vigor 
of our western world. I wish that Scott !N"earing 
or Mrs. Stokes could have taken my place at the oil- 
cloth table where the testimony in the Towergate 
case was reduced into a written record. 

At the risk of wearying you with these instances of 
exposure after submarine attack I must tell you of 
the Marina, an empty horse-transport westward 
bound to America, carrying to their homes a large 
contingent of American horse-attendants or "mule- 
teers." The Marina was torpedoed without warn- 
ing just before daybreak in the autumn of 1916; 
and the engine-room fatalities included two Amer- 
ican coal-passers. Two of the lifeboats which got 
free from the foundering ship were manned almost 
wholly by our American boys; and for two days and 
a night, without proper clothing or sustenance, these 
tiny craft tore shoreward together in a !N^ovember 
hurricane. The vanishing of daylight on the second 
evening, forty hours after the disaster, found them 
out of touch with each other, although not really far 
apart, driving at frightful speed before a roaring 

123 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

gale into the rockbound bay of Ballinskelligs, the 
most notoriously cruel of the dangerous Kerry fjords ; 
and at nine o'clock and ten o'clock respectively they 
burned their last red flares, uselessly they supposed, 
in the mist and spindrift. Their doom seemed to 
have been sealed. I was reminded of Grotius' 
phrase, "Inter fauces terrae." 

Meanwhile the ubiquitous and powerful forces 
of the British Navy had been at work. Tugs were 
beating back and forth across the path of drift from 
the disaster, and light-keepers had been warned by 
wireless to keep vigilant watch. The lookout at the 
Skelligs Light caught the gleam from those final 
flares, and signaled swiftly to a trawler; and before 
half-past ten the plucky little craft had rescued one 
boatload, and was steaming intrepidly into the depths 
of the bay in the pitchy darkness after the other. 

And at eleven o'clock this second boatload was lo- 
cated at last, not four hundred yards from the raving 
surf -line under the cliffs ; and the trawler drew along- 
side it For a heart-breaking interval the help seemed 
to have come too late. Our boys were exhausted and 
chilled to such a degree that they could neither climb 
onto the tug nor even do their part in making fast to 
it. But instantly and indomitably the young British 
reserve lieutenant wheeled his ship about and thrust 

124 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

her boldly in between the boat and the nearing 
breakers, so that the force of the wind clamped the 
light lifeboat against her side while the eighteen 
Americans were lifted bodily like children by the 
British tars out from the very jaws of an awful 
death ! 

All honor, say I, to the fearless and tireless British 
I^avy. E'ight and day, year in and year out, it has 
been keeping its wonderful resources steadily bearing 
against the German iron sharks. Britain's pride in 
her seamen and her JJ^avy has been a thousand times 
well won by acts of hardihood and devotion which 
shed credit upon the entire family of mankind. And 
now, too, it has become possible for us as Americans 
to join our own splendid and stout-hearted destroyer 
crews under this encomium, for their brilliant and 
patient heroism in the most nerve-proving task ever 
set an American naval force. As one who has been 
privileged to see both Navies at work in the danger 
zone I am proud to believe that never have brothers- 
in-arms been better paired in meeting labor and dan- 
ger than are now the personnels of the Navies of the 
two great English-speaking nations. 

The fortunate ending of the Marina case, how- 
ever, was not matched in the case of another horse- 
transport, the Biissian. The Leyland liner Btissian, 

125 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

on a westbound voyage, also, was torpedoed without 
warning just after night had come down over an 
angry sea far out from land in the Mediterranean 
a month later than the loss of the Marina. Under 
drenching torrents of rain and a sky quaking with 
electricity the launching of the Rtissian's boats be- 
came a wild nightmare; and one of the boats was 
overturned and lost, with twenty-eight deaths. Seven- 
teen Americans were among these dead. 

Just as subfaarines never withhold their attacks to 
allow tempests to abate, so they never delay because 
of distance from the land. In many instances a lit- 
tle forbearance on the part of the U-boats would mul- 
tiply many fold the chances of their victims for sur- 
vival. But the principle patently is to attack upon 
sight, — except when waiting to strike at dusk, — irre- 
spective of the distance to the shore. The HeMoria 
was attacked and sunk three hundred and fifty miles 
from land, the Ahosso three hundred, the Killamey 
two hundred and twenty, and the HesperideSj 8wanr 
more and Towergate more than two hundred. In- 
deed the list of ships destroyed two hundred miles 
from land, as is well known, could be greatly ex- 
tended; and the stories of desperate struggles to 
reach safety indefinitely so. 

126 



I LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

Curiously enough the case occurring farthest out 
at sea which I handled did not result in any deaths. 
The diminutive American lumber schooner Wood- 
ward Abrahams, of New York, was attacked on an 
April evening in the Korth Atlantic four hundred 
and seven miles from the Kerry coast. Her crew 
of nine men were deserted in that position; and for 
two days and nights they bore southward in order to 
reach a more frequented path of shipping. Their 
energy was rewarded, and their danger apparently 
done, when they were picked up by another little 
pitch-pine carrier, the ITorwegian barque Arnia 
Maria, But this rescue proved to be only a respite. 
Two days later the Anna Maria in her turn was 
sighted by a submarine. The Germans signaled to 
the Norwegians to send a boat off, and when this was 
done gave the master five minutes in which to aban- 
don ship. The master protested that he had another 
crew, already once submarined, on board; and as an 
act of grace the U-boat extended the time-limit by 
an extra five minutes ! 

Captain Van Namee, our New York Dutch skip- 
per, marshaled his men nonchalantly once more into 
the little lifeboat from his own lost ship, and set 
sail valiantly toward Ireland for a second time. 
The winds were favorable and the sea kind; and so 

127 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

great progress did the Woodward Abrahams' boat 
make that it was within fifty miles of the coast a 
day later when sighted and picked up by a British 
Naval ship. In due course the sturdy captain and 
his men came stamping and joking into the Con- 
sulate, without a scratch or an ill, just six days after 
they had been left to their fate more than four 
hundred miles out upon the ocean wastes. 

Like a large number of other incidents in the sub- 
marine campaign, the case of the Woodward Ahra- 
Jiams exemplifies the truism, previously adverted to, 
that men can and will work wonders when their lives 
are at stake. In the case of the Mar gam Abbey, re- 
ported by my colleague at Cardiff, the survivors were 
forced to tear the shirts from their backs to caulk 
the gaping cracks which their boat sprang. In the 
case of the Verdi the men held their hands in the 
boat's plug-hole while fashioning a new plug in rougt 
weather a hundred miles out at sea. Yet in many 
such cases the boats win safely to the shore. 

The summer of 1918 has brought the ultimate 
proof of the German indifference to distance from 
land; for already four cases have been reported of 
vessels sunk and crews abandoned twelve hundred 
miles or more from land, the cases of the Dwinskj 
Chilier, Manx King and Marosa. 

123 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

The mere fortuitous fact of the survival of fel- 
low-men abandoned at all hours, in all seasons and 
weathers, and at all distances from land possesses 
no exculpatory force as to the criminality of the 
abandonment Such survivals are due to the pluck, 
luck, stamina and skill of the victims. Do you re- 
member that amazing specimen of Central European 
diplomatic explanation which emanated from Yienna 
in one of the cases in which lifeboats had been over- 
whelmed and lost after a harrowing fight with the 
sea? The Austrians urbanely stated that the boats 
had been deserted by the submarine thirty miles 
from shore in fair weather, and that if stormy 
weather had unfortunately supervened before the 
boats could reach safety this consummation was not 
the fault of the Royal and Imperial Austro-Hun- 
garian Government. The storm was accidental, and 
the injuries were no one's fault — si tegula cecederit, 
as the civil law hath it! 

In many cases I think we may concede that the 
malice shown by the submarine is passive rather 
than active. The submarine officers not infrequently 
perform with a mechanical impassiveness the tasks 
into which they have been drilled by coercion. But 
there are countless indications that this impersonal — 

129 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

nay, positively inorganic — stolidity cloaks ill-will 
oftener than not; and that in the general majority of 
instances there is positive rather than negative mal-'i 
ice in the abandonments of the lifeboats. Eor ex- 
ample it would manifestly be easy for commanders 
of U-boats, without fracturing their duty, to keep 
slow steamers under surveillance for several hours 
during violent weather, so as to postpone the attack 
until the sea could give the victims at least a decent 
chance to get their boats away favorably. In many 
cases, too, when such a ship is sighted far out from 
land the Germans might follow her for a day or two 
until she attained some proximity to the shore. Fre- 
quently assistance could be given to the lifeboats in 
the way of supplies or provisions, and it would often 
be feasible to tow the lifeboats some distance on their 
way toward land. 

The almost universal absence of any of these nat- 
ural and obvious acts of good-will by the men who 
are the instruments of Germany's U-boat policy fas- 
tens upon these men an unmistakably active and 
positive personal malice and evil-will. In cases 
where the submarines deliberately invoke the dark- 
ness of night as an adjunct in their crimes the qual- 
ity of this malice becomes blatant ; but in every case 
of the abandonment of boats the Germans rely upon 

130 



I LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

an equally active expectation that the awful forces 
of Nature will be their accessories after the fact. 
It is definitely their intention that their victims 
shall not survive; and whether in any given case 
the outcome be life or death we are forced to take 
the will for the deed. The desertion of lifeboats, 
irrespective of the result in individual instances, ac- 
cordingly possesses, like gunfire and the wamingless 
use of torpedoes, every requisite legal element of will- 
ful murder. And while gunfire and torpedoes are 
only particularized murder, the consigning of life- 
boats to the ocean is so essential a part of the use 
of submarines at all that it constitutes an astound- 
ingly universalized or wholesale system of murder. 

One of the clearest proofs in this connection is 
the common refusal by submarines to tow lifeboats, 
even under propitious circumstances. In the early 
days of the war this was otherwise, and the sub- 
mersibles from time to time actually volunteered to 
give their victims a leg on the journey to land by 
towing the lifeboats. We at Queenstown had more 
or less to do with reporting at least three instances 
of this kind — the Blenheim, Belford and Thor II — 
and possibly one or two others. Occasionally this 
genuine German kindness cropped up even toward 
the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917. In 

131 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

sinking the American steamer Leelanaw, in 1916, 
the Germans seem to have exercised such humanity 
as was possible, it will be recalled; and actually 
towed the boats for fifty miles. 

In general, however, as the war grew more bitter 
these instances grew more rare ; and by the late sum- 
mer of 1916 the requests for towage which the vic- 
tims had learned to make were almost uniformly 
repulsed. Even in the early cases the least shadow 
of a reason sufficed to deter the submarines from any 
act of mercy; and by the end of 1916 the U-boats 
usually did not trouble even to vouchsafe any excuse. 
They rejected the appeals for towage with silent 
disdain or even with abusive contumely. 

The case of the Norwegian steamer Storsiad is in 
point. The Storstad was bearing grain from below 
the equator, in the direct employ of the Belgian Re- 
lief Commission; and her errand of charity was 
plainly marked all over her hull and sails. The 
great canvas globes of the Relief Commission hung 
at two of her mastheads. She called at Las Palmas, 
and waited there — presumably until her letters of as- 
surance from the Germans arrived — up to the end 
of February, 1917. After another delay at Gibraltar 
the Storstad at last reached the danger zone early 

132 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

in March, and was within seventy miles of the Skel- 
ligs Light when the sharks finally got her. 

The submarine appeared at ten o'clock in the 
morning about three miles off the starboard bow- 
beam and commenced firing, at one-minute intervals. 
As the sea was rough they were unable to hit their 
object, and after fifteen minutes desisted and drew 
closer up to the Storstad. After another fifteen min- 
utes, during which the nature of the ship must have 
become clamorously apparent, the Germans dis- 
charged a torpedo which struck the port side of the 
Storstad and reduced her to a sinking condition. The 
three lifeboats were launched within ten minutes; 
and the submarine, which was by this time only 
four hundred yards from the ship, proceeded to par- 
ley with them for particulars about the prize. The 
master of the Storstad, after a few minutes' talk, 
requested to be towed toward the land, and found that 
the submarine officers, for the first time, were un- 
able to catch his meaning. He repeated the request 
with the utmost clearness, and found that the Ger- 
mans apparently did not hear his voice at all. As 
a third and last attempt he and his men made signs 
by means of their ropes, and forced the U-boat to 
observe these; but the supercilious and contemptu- 
ous attitude which had found expression in exple- 

133 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

tives not a moment ago was now expressing itself in 
malicious silence. The commander of the submer- 
sible had no notion of spoiling his effect. He drew 
off and betook himself to shell the Storstad, occasion- 
ally plumping a shell near the receding boats, either 
by design or carelessness. 

I need not go into the details of the lifeboats* 
struggles. The March weather grew worse instead 
of better. Only one of the three lifeboats was ever 
saved, so far as we learned; and one of the officers 
among her occupants lay down and died upon the 
deck of the Admiralty sloop, within ten minutes of 
the rescue, from the familiar complaint of "Exhaus- 
tion and exposure." 

Other cases in which towage was refused are those 
of the Hesperides, Westlothian, George PywrnaUj 
and Richard De Larrinaga, and I know not how 
many more — certainly several score. The Hes- 
perides' lifeboat appeared to be, and was believed to 
be, in a sinking condition when the submarine sailed 
away from it ; but grit and ingenuity, with an abate- 
ment of the sea, kept it afloat until help arrived. In 
the case of the SolbakJcen, reported by our Consular 
Agent at Bilbao, the submarine towed a lifeboat very 
humanely until one o'clock in the morning ; and then, 
because the weather became tempestuous, sought 

134 



LIFEBOATS DESERTED AT SEA 

safety for itself below the waves, casting off tlie lit- 
tle boat summarily to its mercy. Alfred Nojes 
is authority for an instance in which a U-boat 
granted towage for an hour or more, and then sud- 
denly and capriciously submerged without warning 
and without freeing the tow-line. Only the victims' 
quickness and strength in whipping out knives and 
sawing through the stout rope saved them from being 
dragged below the surface of the ocean ! 



CHAPTER VIII 

GERMAN MOTIVES AND MOEALS 

The only saving feature as to towage and deser- 
tion, by a sardonic paradox, is formed by certain 
willful lying which the Germans do — lying about the 
distances to the land. They frequently understate 
deliberately the length of the journey which the sur- 
vivors must accomplish to reach green earth again. 
In the case of the Vandiuira, a four-masted Nor- 
wegian barque fetching dyewood from Jamaica, the 
submarine officer informed the iNorse seamen that 
Ireland was just seventy miles distant when it was 
in fact two hundred miles distant. In the case of 
the Killamey — in which the submarine had placed 
its wireless masts abreast instead of fore-and-aft, 
to make its apparent course at right angles with 
its true one — the Germans estimated the distance to 
the Fastnet at one hundred and twenty miles when 
it was actually more than two hundred and twenty 
miles. Similar understatements, some of which have 

136 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

unquestionably been intentional, have been several 
times reported. 

Usually the victims have made their own nautical 
computations, so that the U-boat falsehoods are rather 
fatuous; but as symptoms of compunction the under- 
statements are worth noting. They show that some 
of the wretched supermen still cringe from facing the 
indignation, even if it be perforce unspoken, of their 
victims. At least this is the explanation most to be 
preferred. That such mendacities should be born 
from the mere wish to mock and tantalize is less 
probable than that their makers dread to meet the 
eyes of men who know the full facts as to the extent 
of the submarine's wrongdoing. 

So much for the means and methods of the Ger- 
man selachians ; or, better, so much for description of 
the cardinal external features of their submarine 
war. In addition to these external features there 
exist a number of less overt offenses which might 
well have been taken up, and which must at least 
receive some transient allusion here. 

For example, there are the attempts, sometimes 
successful we know, to corrupt sea-captains by Ger- 
man gold to sell their honor and betray their own' 
ships. Sometimes this plan consists in having the 

137 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

masters actually place bombs, or connive at the se- 
creting of bombs, on board their vessels; and some- 
times the masters have only been asked to rendezvous 
with a submarine which should carry out the actual 
act of destruction. I handled one case in which a 
vessel cleared New York ostensibly without wire- 
less, but set up an emergency apparatus while on the 
Atlantic. This vessel was destroyed when she en- 
tered the danger zone ; and the inference is too broad 
to be overlooked. Whatever the mode adopted, this 
policy of bribery and subornation is more than 
equivalent to administering poison-gas to men's 
souls; and it extends and abuses to an insufferable 
degree that agency to which all nations resort- within 
proper limits, the agency of espionage or secret serv- 
ice. 

The trampling upon diplomatic obligations and 
promises, new and old alike, which the Germans 
have made a part of their submarine campaign need 
only be barely mentioned; for the duplicity and 
scorn of honesty shown in Berlin's negotiations re- 
garding the undersea warfare are already a familiar 
reek in the nostrils of all intelligent men. The fact 
that the submarines never seek encounters with ves- 
sels of war, so that their operations have none of 
the redeeming heroic elements of combats between 

138 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

armed contestants, would doubtless carry no worm- 
wood for men who are so devoid of sportsmanship as 
to have coined the remark, "You will always be fools 
and we will never be gentlemen" ; but it will hardly 
appear devoid of significance to Americans. Last 
but not least, the offenses against Belgian Relief ships 
deserve far more emphasis than can be here accorded 
them; and the assaults against hospital ships will 
never, until the invention of radical new departures 
in human expression, receive the treatment which we 
would all like to see them get. 

All these features, however — the corruption of 
captains, the negation of honor in diplomacy, the 
avoidance of armed adversaries, and the destruction 
of food for orphans and of the lives of wounded 
men — must be dismissed with only a bare reference 
in this present account of visible and overt acts and 
deeds. The really salient concrete elements of the 
campaign are the bombardments, the stealthy use of 
torpedoes, the passenger attacks, the deadly mis- 
chievousness with which survivors are treated on the 
scenes of the disasters, and the invoking of the cruel- 
ties of N^ature by abandoning lifeboats at sea. As 
to these latter elements the probative material has 
been marshaled in brief review; and having looked 

139 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

at the facts in regard to them, a further duty — and a 
very grave one — remains. 

For from these tangible external phenomena, some 
of which lawyers call the autoptical evidence, our 
minds cannot fail to reason back to the kind of char- 
acter which must lie behind them ; and, from a con- 
sideration of the methods, to reach conclusions as to 
the spirit. In jurisprudence men's acts are held to 
be evidentiary of their states of mind; and in psy- 
chology acts are held to be the outward projections 
of inward "complexes" of mental, moral and emo- 
tional states. 

There are some people whose nature is so kindly 
or idealistic that they shrink from their duty of ap- 
praising the German submarine guilt. They do not 
wish to see that when any unprecedented acts take 
on a certain degree of awfulness it becomes incum- 
bent upon all men to give the best intelligence they 
can muster to a study, issuing if need be in a denun- 
ciation, of the bearing of such acts upon the great 
moral problems which humanity was created to work 
out. Presumptuous as it may seem for any man 
to pass a moral judgment, fate forces us to spend 
most of our time in doing so about every detail of 
life; and when we shirk this task the race fails to 

140 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

progress. Moreover such an adjudgment of the 
U-boats is a duty of patriotism; for no American 
can rightly support the President in this war unless 
he has formed personal opinions to the best of his 
ability about Germany's conduct. 

At the Queenstown Consulate we could no more 
escape formulating opinions about the spirit of the 
submarine warfare than you yourself could avoid 
forming ideas about the character of any men whose 
behavior you are forced closely to watch. 

In facing the ethical aspects of the German TJ-boat 
campaign the French and Italian and British pub- 
lics have given America a splendid lead in the di- 
rection of fair-mindedness. They do not condemn 
the submarine blockade merely because it attempts 
to starve them; for they are attempting, with Amer- 
ica's willing help, to starve the Central Powers. 
Neither do they condemn the Germans for having 
caught up and used vigorously a horrible new weapon 
of warfare, such as the submarine is. All war is 
conducted with horrible weapons ; and the submarine, 
if used against armed combatants, has hardly more 
intrinsic horror than the poison-gas which, because 
we have been forced to, we are now ourselves using. 

When gunpowder and other explosives were first 
141 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

introduced in Europe the piety and chivalry of the 
world execrated and denounced their barbarity and 
unfairness ; and yet before many decades, on account 
of their miraculous efficiency, explosives were in use 
in holy wars just as they were in unholy ones. Un- 
doubtedly, say our Allies, the time will come when 
other countries besides Germany and Austria will 
avail themselves of the frightfully effective instru- 
ment of destruction which the submarine has proved 
itself to be. 

The gravamen of the charge against the German 
naval authorities, accordingly, must lie not so much 
in the fact of their having resorted to a subsea cam- 
paign as in the wrongful and perverted manner in 
which the new weapon has been exploited. Eor res- 
olutely as the world has taken upon its conscience the 
use of explosives we have always recognized certain 
limitations. There has been a discrimination, more 
and more careful to the point of extreme scrupulous- 
ness, to exclude from the scope of destruction all per- 
sons not active participants in war. The use of liv- 
ing screens in battles has been prohibited ; solicitous 
restrictions have been thrown around the besieging 
of inhabited cities. The rights of blockading or 
raiding warships against non-combatant ships have 
been closely circumscribed. (It is possible that the 

142 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

recent American and Allied air-raids against Ger- 
man cities form an exception; but these will be en- 
tered by the Recording Angel to balance the German 
air-raids, not the German submarine crimes.) 

Thus on the basis of our past and present conduct, 
upon the whole, we may reasonably believe that the 
submarine in our hands will be principally confined 
to its proper use against vessels of war. We dare 
not say that its availability for use against non-com- 
batant vessels — in other words its use as a blockader 
— will not be made the subject of continual experi- 
ment; but the inherent unsuitability of its employ- 
ment on the high seas, because of the necessity of 
leaving lifeboats to the elements, will certainly result 
in restrictions similar to those heretofore worked out 
in such matters as the besieging of inhabited cities. 
President Wilson's high-minded words in this con- 
nection represent the whole Allied mind, — "We shall, 
I feel confident, conduct our operations as belliger- 
ents without passion, and shall ourselves observe with 
proud punctilio the principles of right and fair play 
we profess to be fighting for." And this being true, 
it is a fair charge that the Germans have employed 
the new horror against an improper class of persons 
— civilian non-combatants. 

But totally aside from, and more important than, 
143 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 



I 



the dubious quarter in which, this new weapon has) 
been applied, is the needlessly degraded spirit ini 
which it has been applied; a spirit observable alike 3 
in its operations against proper and against improper ' 
objects of attack. Eor in using explosives, as is ! 
well known, the nations have not stopped with re- 
stricting the class of victims but have gone further' 
and eliminated in every way possible the non-essen- 
tial horrors, even in wars between armed combatants. 
Expanding bullets of the dum-dum type have been 
interdicted, as have poisoned shells; and every facil- 
ity for assistance to the wounded has been safe- 
guarded. Whenever it has been possible to mitigate 
the awfulnesses attendant on the use of explosives 
and other weapons this has been done. So that if 
ever, under stress of peril or temptation, the civi- 
lized powers should resort to the submarine for block- 
ade work against non-combatants, we may at least 
assert, and assert with absolute vigor and positive- 
ness, that we would strive to humanize and elevate 
its use to the utmost degree possible. 

This is where the Germans have fallen so lament- 
ably into the slough. So far from seeking to tem- 
per and soften the inherent horrors of submarine 
warfare they have deliberately sought to accentuate 
and augment them. They have willfully omitted and 

144 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

turned their backs upon the many measures that 
might so easily civilize without impairing the force 
of their weapon. "Nay more, they have in many par- 
ticulars maliciously added to its natural horrors and 
intensified its intrinsic barbarity. It is precisely in 
this uncalled-for and gratuitous aggravation of the 
cruelties native to submarine work that the German 
crime is most blinding and unbearable. 

The substance of the crime being thus defined, we 
are immediately faced with the question of motiva- 
tion. Have these excessive atrocities been the re- 
sult of the official German will or have they been 
contributed spontaneously by individual comman- 
ders ? And, whether the one or the other, have they 
been conceived calmly and scientifically or have they 
sprung from passion, hatred and personal cruelty? 
And again, if all these elements, official and personal, 
mental and emotional, enter in at various times and 
places, in what proportions do they occur? Which 
ones are paramount or predominant? Any answers 
which we can find to such questions as these cannot 
fail to affect our relations with and attitude toward 
not only Germany as a whole but individual Ger- 
mans for very many years to come. 

The fundamental answer, so it seemed to us at 
145 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

Queenstown as we toiled amid the evidence, is that 
by far the greater part of the U-boat wickednesses do 
flow from a single — and thank heaven a rather im- 
personal — source; but that the campaign was also 
stained by a shameful quantity of personal and emo- 
tional spite and cruelty. The great and omnipresent 
underlying principle which has caused the quality 
of the submarine blockade to repel humanity has 
been the official Prussian ruthlessness — and I wish 
there were a good unused synonym for that hack- 
neyed word. The getting of results, without reck 
or ruth as to incidental means or consequences, has 
been the first and only consideration, it seemed to 
us, of the spiritual descendants of the "Man of blood 
and iron." Human life, individual or collective, has 
seemed to have lost not merely its sanctity but any 
consideration at all. And, as the greater includes 
the lesser, human suffering and the rights of wom- 
anhood and childhood are also ignored. The under- 
sea war, as Berlin has willed it, knows no allevia- 
tions, no mutual understandings, no humanizations. 
It is simply stark one hundred per cent war. 

This cold-blooded and calmly-reasoned govern- 
mental policy accounts directly — in broad outline at 
least — for many of the worst submarine atrocities, 
such as the attacks upon passenger ships and the 

146 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

abandomnent of open boats. Individual comman- 
ders have no scope or responsibility on such actions. 
The decision has been immovably fixed by Berlin 
as a consequence of the official determination utterly 
to subordinate means to ends. 

A touch of the personal does enter in, of course, 
even to this impersonal principle, in so far as it 
has been evolved by Junker statesmen who happen 
to be themselves peculiarly brutal men. It is at 
this point that we first must take cognizance of that 
strain of beastly personal cruelty which has long 
been a notorious characteristic of a certain class of 
Prussians. The presence of this racial defect in 
many of the men who create Germany's policies must 
have entered into the production of the otherwise 
impersonal ruthlessness. 

But aside from this intrusion of a moral defor- 
mity which marks many individuals in Prussia the 
ruthlessness of the U-boat campaign is, as has been 
said, an abstract governmental policy ; based on men- 
tal processes and ratiocination rather than on any 
existence in the German Government of actual ma- 
lignancy or anger. It represents the German Gov- 
ernment's reasoned conclusions as to the way in 
which submarine war should be conducted. If two 
countries are at war, says the German brain, the 

147 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

quickest and therefore best way to terminate that 
situation is to make the war as thorough and extreme 
as possible. All war consists in doing evil that good 
may come. Why not do enough evil to bring about the 
result at the earliest moment? Why do anything 
by halves? Many an American has been rather 
caught by this superficially rational and practical 
doctrine. 

As a creation of academic logic this argument is 
possibly of classic flawlessness; but in ordinary life, 
fortunately, people do not act upon abstruse logic. 
They act upon individual virtues and vices — or likes 
and dislikes, if you prefer — modified to a reasonable 
degree by the results of brain-work. That is why 
as individuals we never find ourselves in private life 
conducting a one hundred per cent feud with an 
enemy, no matter how he has wronged us. If a 
man injures me by economic competition, or steals 
my goods, violates my home, or attempts to murder 
me, I seek retribution it is true, and seek it ener- 
getically — Americans believe in taking their own 
part — ^but I do not declare a one hundred per cent 
war upon him. I may boycott my enemy or sue him, 
or have a stand-up-and-knock-down to take the mean- 
ness out of his anatomy, or even in some contingen- 

148 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

cies get a gun and go after him and shoot him. But 
I do not kill innocent neighbors' children incident- 
ally to my vengeance, nor do I arrange to have him 
die of thirst even if that be the only means of retal- 
iation available. And I do not desecrate his corpse, 
burn his house and torture his widow as a warning 
to other men that I am not to be trifled with. 

At least if I come from a civilized or semi-civi- 
lized race I do not do those things. And if I did 
do them I would be considered not merely a criminal 
but a maniac. The world recognizes that such acts, 
however rational they may be from the logical stand- 
point, are so far removed from true reasonableness 
that they are in fact the very acme of irrationality 
and insanity. 

The situation as between nations is strictly anal- 
ogous. Being aggregations of individuals, they be- 
have in the same irrational but very human and 
rather convenient way that individuals behave. A 
nation which insists upon one hundred per cent war 
is just as truly an international monster and maniac 
as a man who kills innocent third parties or wreaks 
savagery in a personal quarrel is a private monster 
and maniac. To justify submarine atrocities by say- 
ing that they are simply results of Germany's durchr 

149 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 1 

und-durch logicality is a slander upon our God-given 
reason. 

In each of Americans wars there has been much of 
mutual forbearance. The War of 1812 was decid- 
edly a good-natured one, with neither side very 
warmly roused against the other. During our Civil 
War there were endless instances of amenities and 
reciprocal respect. During the Spanish-American 
War neither side was bitterly inflamed; and I have 
no doubt there are Spanish incidents to balance Cap- 
tain Phillip's remark ofi Santiago, "Don't cheer, 
boys; the poor fellows are dying!" 

But clearly as we now see that the submarine 
ruthlessness, bred from the idea of making war a 
one hundred per cent affair, is a colossal and wicked 
error, there was a time when we were willing to 
admit that this error might conceivably be a sincere 
one; and that it had a semblance of evil grandeur, 
like the designs of Milton's Satan in "Paradise Lost." 
Earnestly as we repudiate and revile it, there was 
once a feeling that if submarine atrocities are the 
creatures solely of this intellectual Frankenstein the 
heart of the German people might still be relatively 
unsullied. And for quite a time at Queenstown the 
evidence showed enough cases of German submarine 
courtesy almost to delude us into thinking that the 

150 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

German crimes spraxig from a brain-m.istake due to 
the German worship of abstract mental processes. 

There was one piece of evidence particularly whicK 
supported this view. An American merchant of- 
ficer named Adolph Colstad, born in ^Norway, but 
for thirty years an American citizen, chanced to bo 
serving in the autumn of 1916 as mate on board the 
late steamship Harpalus. The Harpalus was a col- 
lier bound from Bristol to Kantes, and was attacked 
at ten o'clock in the morning thirty-eight miles south- 
west of Galley Head, Ireland. Eor nearly three 
hours after the attack it befell that Mr. Colstad — ^I 
believe he holds an American master's license — ^re- 
mained in the company of the German officers of the 
submarine. Inevitably he struck up an acquaintance 
with them, and after a time even ventured to tax them 
for an explanation of the cruelties of the submarine 
campaign. To his astonishment they assured him, 
very earnestly and with tears in their eyes, that if 
they ever withheld their hands for the sake of show- 
ing mercy, and if their crew informed upon them 
on the return to Germany, they would be put to deatK 
officially by slow physical torture. They further 
stated that two different German submarine com- 
manders have actually been tortured to death in the 

151 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 1 

Fatherland for acts of compassion as to which their ] 
crews have "peached" upon them! 

When Captain Colstad told me this I turned and 
said to him rather sharply, "Surely, you did not be- 
lieve any such fantastic hoax as that ?" "But I do, 
Mr. Frost," he insisted with dignity. "They made 
me believe it. I want you to put it in my affidavit." 
And he not only stood fast in his belief but eventu- 
ally swore to it. Some courts would exclude this 
testimony under the Hearsay Rule, and some would 
not. It is submitted here for such weight as you care 
to give it. Personally I think there is at least a 
measure of truth behind it, and that many of the 
submarine officers believe that no mercy will be 
shown them by their Government if they permit any 
human weakness for mercy to interfere with success. 

The evidence of Captain Colstad was too late and 
dubious, however, and the courtesy instances were too 
sparse and defective, to countervail the cases of dis- 
gusting and flagrant cruelty which had grown to be 
pretty frequent by the end of 1916 — pure brutalities 
such as those of the Ainsdale and Madura and Eave- 
stone cases. We could not but note that the cour- 
tesies were usually meretricious and cheap; and we 
were forced to conclude that while civilities are prob- 
ably enjoined by the German Government the in- 

152 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

junction must be neutralized by an understanding 
that the quality of mercy must be very scientifically 
strained. For whenever the Consulate would begin 
to feel, for a. fortnight or so, that the impersonal 
ruthlessness at Berlin was the seat of all the blame 
and guilt we would suddenly again get little clusters 
— two or three cases — of the nauseating and aggres- 
sive barbarities for which mere ruthlessness could 
never account. 

Even so there remains an alternative from suppos- 
ing that these devilries arose out of native individual 
black-heartedness. They may be samples of terroris- 
tic SchrecJclichJceit. For ruthlessness cannot stop 
with merely caring nothing about the lives of its 
victims. It is forced, if it is to be consistent, to 
extend itself into an active desire to terrorize its 
foes in the only way terror can be generated, viz. 
by actual death and cruelties. The official German 
injunction to ruthlessness has therefore presumably 
been supplemented by instructions to practice fright- 
fulness whenever feasible. Just how this can be 
squared with the instructions about courtesy is hard 
to say; but I fancy that in both matters the instruc- 
tions are not so much formal as informal, drawn 
from personal interviews and contact by comman- 
ders with their superiors, so that different ideas are 

153 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

uppermost at various times. General rules for act- 
ing like fiends can hardly be laid down; and it fol- 
lows that no matter how spontaneous and intimately 
personal in origin a piece of dastardliness may seem, 
it may still represent an honest effort by a submarine 
commander to follow instructions from the men 
higher up. 

The idea of frightfulness, as applied to submarine 
war, would of course be for each commander, when 
the circumstances seem to him right, to behave with 
such ferocity that the entire South Irish Channel 
and other infested waters will be shunned by every 
merchant seaman. Given a general idea such as this, 
and finding that the merchant seamen are strangely 
unwilling to be terrified, there are hardly any lengths 
to which a commander may not go in his flustered 
hopelessness of bogeyizing our staunch sailors. It 
is not improbable that some of the worst submarine 
cruelties have been frenzied attempts by commanders 
to put frightfulness across against men who do not 
seem even to know when they are frightened! 

Eut after all, whittle down the personal element as 
we might, there remained among the Queenstown 
cases a small irreducible residuum of cases whose facts 
showed flatly that the submarines' men took more 

154 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

tHan cordially to their work, and were improvising 
barbarities on mere casual temptation, owing to down- 
right Frederick-the-Great bloodthirstiness. "WJiile 
there might be no positive criteria for deciding 
whether given acts were conscientious attempts to 
terrify or were gratifications of innate private 
cruelty, still there would be strong indications to- 
ward the latter conclusion. There would be a lack 
of self-possession and self-control about the Germans 
which showed that they were quite beside themselves, 
and were incapable of acting solely to carry out a 
reasoned policy either of ruthlessness or frightful- 
ness. Flushed faces, stuttering objurgations, and im- 
promptu hectoring in ways that were almost as ridic- 
ulous as repellent — all these were signs that the 
U-boat men were simply giving free license to their 
tempers and were yielding to their wild-beast in- 
stincts. Most of these were Prussians, we supposed. 
These volunteered-cruelty cases, thank heaven, do 
not form a very heavy percentage of the total. Aver- 
aging the campaign as a whole, my guess would be 
that up to eight per cent of the attacks have mani- 
fested a heathenish love of cruelty for its own sake ; 
and that perhaps an equal share have shown gen- 
uine, even if very incompletely obeyed, impulses to- 
ward kindness. What of it? In a campaign con- 

155 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

ducted by any of the civilized western powers the 
kindness-cases would include practically all, and 
there would certainly be no such percentage of red- 
Indian savageries. You do not say of a neighbor, 
"He is a good man, for only one out of twelve of his 
acts is mean and vile." 

But even if it were possible to decide — for the 
above opinions are frankly only estimates — ^just how 
much of the campaign is due to collective and how 
much to individual wickedness, there would still be 
the question of why there is such wickedness at all. 
Conceding that the Prussian autocracy is a clique of 
metal-boweled Macchiavels, and that the average 
German is warped and wrought upon from the age 
of unresisting infancy until he can manage to wor- 
ship any sort of national Baals, we have still to ac- 
count for the evolutionary history of those autocratic 
anthropophagi and of the conditions under which 
human beings can be taught cheerfully to work abom- 
inations. 

The most generally-accepted theory of explanation 
is that the form of government, with its pagan re- 
pression of the individual, has gradually evolved or 
permitted the evolution of the German moral degen- 
eracy; and every true democrat must concur in 
ascribing great evil to this autocratic form of gov- 

156 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

eminent. Another factor frequently emphasized as 
contributory to the shocking nature which Germany 
has revealed in the war is that strain of animal 
cruelty mentioned a moment ago as characteristic of 
acme classes of Prussians ; and unquestionably such a 
strain has played an important part in Germany's 
development. The autocracy must "be abolished and 
the cruelty bled out. But I submit that there is a 
third factor just as important as either of theift which 
has gone into the production of the war and of the 
submarine atrocities. This factor is continental 
overpopulation. 

I do not mean overpopulation so much from the 
political as from the moral standpoint — overpopula- 
tion as it tends to produce cynicism and brutal-mind- 
edness. I^o American who has lived in Europe can 
have failed to notice the heavy and over-b»eathed at- 
mosphere caused from the presence of too much hu- 
manity in proportion to the landscape. The sur- 
plusage of human beings has a triple effect, — it 
cheapens the value of each individual, it embitters 
young men by tautening economic competition, and 
it diminishes the amount of wild ^Nature available 
to each man for his re-creation. In Germany the 
heavy birth-rate and the population of three hundred 

157 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

and twenty-four people per square mile — in America 
we have about thirty — has certainly depressed and 
depreciated the respect in which each separate in- 
dividual is held. The economic competition, like- 
wise, is proverbially so constricting that each young 
man sees his career stretching ahead of him as in- 
exorably as a pair of steel rails. If he does not keep 
to the way marked out for him by his circumstances 
and his superiors he must either emigrate or suf- 
focate. And, lastly, the effect of familiarity or un- 
f amiliarity with God's out-of-doors ought not to need 
stressing to Americans ; and in Germany it is hardly 
possible to find any large sanctuary of Nature unex- 
ploited by beer-vending Gasthduser or in some way 
besmirched by man. These are the influences which 
have generated, as much as any others, the cynicism 
and contempt for the finer things of life which some 
of the present-day Germans have shown; and their 
connection with the submarine apparition is imme- 
diate, not remote. 

To the obvious comment that Germany is by no 
means the only overpopulated country in Europe 
must be collated the fact that her situation is pe- 
culiarly calculated to bring out the workings of what 
may be called the spiritual counterpart of the Mal- 
thusian Law of Overpopulation. England plows 

158 



GERMAN MOTIVES AND MORALS 

and reaps the seas, and her economic tension is re- 
laxed by her vast accumulated wealth. France has 
only two hundred people per square mile; and the 
lowest population index of any of the great Euro 
pean countries has given her the highest spiritual 
index. Among the smaller countries the utter im* 
practicality of "hacking a way out" exercised a chas- 
tening effect and prevented the ferment of aggres- 
sion-conquest from ever starting. Thus Germany 
has been a special sufferer from the law — and it is 
far sounder than the Malthusian Law proper — that 
multiplying humanity cannot multiply spiritual 
foodstuffs indefinitely. And I am personally dis- 
posed to give the Germans credit for realizing that 
something of the sort was amiss, and for striving to 
remedy it by various economic expedients and by 
contriving to make their supplies of wild Nature go 
as far as possible. They fostered all kinds of ex- 
cursions afield, and taught young people in the 
Sturmrund-Grund period to rhapsodize methodically 
about the beauties of forests and mountains. Un- 
fortunately there are some things which cannot be 
forced even by Kultur's efficiency; and the whole- 
Bomeness that springs, as Americans have such good 
cause to know, from an abundance of resources of 
Nature is one of those things. 

159 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

Just as the confining of people in an overcrowded 
room generates pulmonary diseases, or just as the 
confining of men on a ship without fresh acids gen- 
erates scorbutic diseases, so the stifling population 
conditions in Germany have generated among some 
classes the spiritual diseases of cynicism and brutal- 
ity. The Germans are from this standpoint to be 
regarded as the victims of a moral auto-intoxication 
or infection — a spiritual leprosy if you will — for 
which they are by no means solely to blame. Sternly 
as we are bound to stamp out the disease, we must 
take its causes into consideration in passing judg- 
ment upon the submarine campaign; and also, may 
it not be said, in reaching any final condition of 
world peace. 



CHAPTER IX 



SUMMAEY AKD APPEAISAI. 



Akd now we have not only examined, as plainly 
as possible, the methods or concrete operations of the 
German iron sharks, but we have gone further and 
examined their spirit, as it was reflected by American 
witnesses at Queenstown. It may be well to reca- 
pitulate briefly the conclusions under both parts of 
the examination. 

With regard to the methods or acts such a sum- 
mary will furnish a definte set of counts to the in- 
dictment we projected at the outset, a sort of "J'ac- 
cuse" or formal enumeration of the malefactions of 
the submarines of the Central Powers: 

1. The German submersibles have repeatedly, al- 
most systematically, shelled defenseless vessels after 
unmistakable surrender. If America ever uses sub- 
marines against merchant ships the shellfire will 
cease, it is safe to say, the moment it has produced 
surrender. 

2. A peculiarly vindictive gunfire is reserved by 

161 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

the German TJ-boats for any vessels which, make the 
slightest attempt at escape, although this escape is not 
from visit and search but from being cast adrift in 
frail lifeboats in the open ocean. An action so nat- 
ural and justifiable as seeking safety will never be 
the pretext for splenetic savageries by submarines 
of civilized powers. 

3. Still more bitter and cruel are the measures 
kept in store by the German subsea boats against 
victims who attempt to defend themselves by any 
armament. After attempts at resistance, and in 
some instances even after attempts at escape, there 
has been gunfire against little boats which had left 
their sinking ships. Here again no non-Germanic 
submarines will indulge in infrahuman revenges for 
efforts toward self-preservation on the part of civil- ., 
ian seamen. ' 

4. Against unarmed vessels the German use of 
the torpedo has habitually been without any warning, 
even under weather conditions rendering the obser- 
vation of lack of armament so easy as to be absolutely 
obligatory. The least duty imposed by decency be- 
fore the firing of a missile calculated to cause sud- 
den destruction is to seek earnestly to discover ab- 
sence of armament and to make human allowances 
accordingly. 

162 



SUMMARY AND APPRAISAL 

5. Against armed merchant vessels no warning 
is given before the use of torpedoes, and no attention 
has ever been given by the Germans to the problem 
of how warning might become practicable. The 
U-boats have preferred to take the fact of armament 
as relieving them from any further human responsi- 
bility for the lives of their victims. The naval au- 
thorities of most nations would have made strong 
efforts to develop devices for giving an armed ship 
at least the option of surrender. 

6. With malice prepense the German submer- 
sibles are r^ularly attacking passenger ships carry- 
ing innocent civilians of all ages and sexes. Such 
attacks will never be made by the naval vessels of 
any other people. 

T. German submarines seldom offer assistance to 
survivors swimming in the sea, and they frequently 
insult and injure the occupants of lifeboats, on the 
scenes of the assaults. Much would be done by ordi- 
nary submarines to aid survivors by lifesaving ap- 
paratus and by emergency rations to provision life- 
boats. 

8. German U-boats seize non-combatant captives 
to serve as hostages. This practice will probably be 
outlawed when international public sentiment can be 
again enforced. 

163 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

9. The marking of a victim-ship during daylight 
and following it to strike after nightfall, to add to 
terror and death, is a feature of the German subma- 
rine tactics. ]!^on-German submarines would prob- 
ably reverse the process and defer attacks from dark- 
ness to daylight. 

10. 'No forbearances are made by the Teutonic 
submarines because of stormy weather, and victims 
are therefore frequently subjected to needless perils 
from gales and wave-action. The contrary policy, 
with surveillance until tempests can moderate, would 
be easy of adoption with comparatively negligible loss 
of efficiency. 

11. The German attacks are also made without 
reference to distance to the land, thus producing 
much gratuitous exposure and misery and death. 
American submarines, we need not fear to assert, 
would seek to follow the objects of their attacks un- 
til the shore was approached, so that the survivors 
might have better chances to save their lives. 

12. Requests for towage toward land are usually 
refused by German submarine commanders, even 
when the conditions are propitious for towage. It 
is inconceivable that the craft of any other nation 
will ever be guilty of such refusals. 

Here we have a round dozen of explicit and defi- 
164 



SUMMARY AND APPRAISAL 

nite statements — arranged in logical rather than 
rhetorical order — for which the evidence has been 
briefed upon earlier pages. It is the evidence of 
honest and intelligent American citizens drawn from 
all walks of life, and of expert and responsible of- 
cers and engineers. In so far as taken at Queens- 
town it was recorded by a man of legal habit of 
mind, well-disposed toward the Germans, and of in- 
ternationalist-pacifist tendencies; and in every case 
it has been taken by American officials selected and 
commissioned by the President and Senate of the 
United States. 

The facts thus testified and recorded show forth, 
it is submitted, a Satan's carnival so shameful that 
it cannot be described even by the word "war," as 
that word is known to white men. The German 
sneer that, "War is not cricket," takes on, in the 
light of the submarine facts, an incredible hateful- 
ness. War may be deadly without being dirty. 
And for Emperor William, with the gangrened 
corpses of thousands of innocent non-combatants be- 
fore his mind's eye, to announce unctuously that he 
will triumph, "With God and my U-boats," is the 
most impious and profane blasphemy ever taken upon 
the lips of a human being ! 

165 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

Let U3 epitomize, in turn, the results of the brief 
inquiry undertaken as to the motivation of the Ger- 
man submarine campaign, namely, its moral aspect, 
remembering that in this case the summary is not so 
much an indictment as a diagnosis: 

1. The essence of the Teutonic guilt as to un- 
dersea warfare lies in the spirit of that warfare, and 
not in the mere exploitation of a new and terrible 
weapon of destruction. The fact of the submarine 
campaign, that it to say, ia less odious than the man- 
ner of it. 

2. The general note of this spirit is an officially 
ruthless will to conquer at any cost, even at the cost 
of intentional atrocities to produce terror and dread. 

3. Supplementing the governmentally-prescribed 
ruthlessness and frightfulness, there have been oc- 
casional supererogatory volunteered brutalities. We 
need not regard these as typical of the German peo- 
ple ; yet there seems little reason why they might not 
be so regarded. 

4. The primary underlying cause of the official 
policies of pitilessness and terrorism has been the 
German infirmity for crude intellectualism — a ser- 
vile submission to dehumanized a priori logic; and 
a secondary cause has been the presence among the 

166 



SUMMARY AND APPRAISAL 

despotic classes in Prussia of a long-demonstrated 
vicious relish and craving for physical cruelties. 

5. The private and impulsive brutalities, to- 
gether with the willingness of the individual Ger- 
mans to execute the inhuman injunctions of their 
Government, are due to cynicism and callousness en- 
gendered partly from the form of the Government, 
partly from the pervading Prussian cruelty, and 
partly from the degradations inevitable where popu- 
lation is excessive. The Germans as individuals may 
be thought to be sound at heart, except where they 
have become victims of a hitherto little-recognized 
moral pathological condition. 

It is no part of my province to discuss the strate- 
gical success or failure of the submarine campaign; 
a subject, for that matter, upon which any man can 
reason for himself from the officially published data. 
The weekly toll of ships sunk has remained about 
stationary for the past nine months, despite the ad- 
vent of the American destroyer flotillas; and the 
British Chancellor of the Exchequer announced re- 
cently that the U-boat total of over six million tons 
sunk last year was offset by only two million tons 
of construction the world over. Our Treasury De- 
partment, by its insurance rates, estimates that one 

167 



GERMAN SUBMARINE WARFARE 

ship out of every twenty-five which go into the dan- 
ger zone is destroyed; and Lloyd's Agency calcu- 
lates that if five ships undertake transatlantic trade 
for a year one of them will be destroyed. The ton- 
nage which the Chairman of the United States Ship- 
ping Board hopes may he built in America this year 
is only slightly over half of what the Germans sank 
last year; while our requirements for General 
Pershing are mounting convulsively. At a rigid 
estimate more than eighteen thousand innocent 
non-combatant men and women and children are 
now rotting beneath the sea from these shark- 
forays. These familiar facts are merely cited here 
in order that if the heinous cruelties discussed in this 
book have not aroused you against the submarine 
menace your interest may at least be shocked awake 
by impending national shame and danger.* 

The facts about this appalling gehenna of brute 
crime and murder ring with an iron clangor of per- 
emptory challenge. America and England are 

* These sentences were written in March, 1918; but at the 
present time of writing (July 25, 1918), while some of the 
facts have altered they still express my point of view. Sev- 
eral British oflScials have within a few days issued warnings 
against the wave of newspaper optimism; and the loss of the 
San Diego, the Leasome Castle, and the magnificent Jiisticia 
ought to carry the warning home into any serious mind. Pres- 
simism about the campaign would be insanity, of course; but 
a sober and ever-vigilant spirit must be maintained yet for 
months, if not years, to come. 

168 



SUMMARY AND APPRAISAL 

girding up their powers ever-increasingly in our 
shark-hunt royal, rejoicing as strong men rejoice to 
prove their mettle in the face of danger. For these 
selachian German monsters must and can be van- 
quished and overwhelmed and extirpated like the 
dragons hunted by the knights of TJther's son; and 
America, which grappled and subdued a stubborn 
wilderness, will find the riveter's hammer as true a 
weapon as the pioneer's ax, and will not relax a 
fiber until she has flooded the face of the sea with 
the hosts of ships to stifle and smother this equally 
inhuman adversary. Rancor and hatred the shark- 
outrages can never provoke in the hearts of true 
Americans; but grim resolution and high purposes 
they cannot fail to kindle fiercely. We must re- 
iterate from our inmost beings the pledge voiced by 
Beatrice Barry — 

"That little children may in safety ride 

The strong clean waters of Thy splendid seas. 

That Anti-Christ be no more glorified. 

To mock Thy justice with his blasphemies, 

We come; but not with threats or braggart boasts. 

Hear us, Lord God of Hosts !" 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 



CHAPTER I 

THE QUEENSTOWN BACKGEOTJND 

I LANDED at Queenstown, my second official sta- 
tion, on May 14, 1914; about three months before the 
beginning of the war, or about a year before the 
Lusitania disaster. The landing was like an arrival 
into paradise. A rose-madder daybreak in the east 
and a pale-gold moon setting in the west threw an 
unneeded glamour over the romantic fortresses of 
Carlisle, Camden and Templebreedy, and over the es- 
tuaries and inlets of the most beautiful harbor in the 
world. The town of Queenstown, rising against the 
abrupt hillside of the Cove of Cork, in the clear 
morning light, was crowned by the Admiralty House 
and the fine spires of St. Colman's Cathedral. "The 
pleasant waters of the River Lee," celebrated in 
Father Front's verses, spread, shimmering, before 
the prow of our landing-tender in positively Hes- 
perian loveliness; and the massive rock escarpments 
under Spy Hill were gorgeous with purple valerian 
and golden laburnum. 

173 



THE CRIME OF THE ^XUSITANIA" 

Tiiis was the place which, little as we could tEen 
guess it, within a single turn of the seasons was to 
plunge into a species of waking-nightmare unimag- 
inably trying. It was to give eternally compromis- 
ing connotations to the word "Hesperian" by the 
tragedies of the vessels Hesperian and Hesperides, 
and was to take the music out of Henry James* 
phrase, "Lusitanian loveliness." It was to be known 
no longtr as the world's most stately harbor, but as 
"the port of horrors." 

The background in which these horrors stand to 
me, that is, the preliminary events and consular ac- 
tivities, can be filled in in a few paragraphs. Queens- 
town proved to be a busy consular post The in- 
spection of emigrants, the invoicing of Irish whiskey, 
mackerel and tweeds, and the issuance of bills of 
health to the passenger liners — ^most of which still 
touched at the port — provided a substantial office 
routine; and a great deal of consular notarial and 
legal work arose from the fact that the South of Ire- 
land is saturated with people who have American 
ties. Then there were the American tourists bent 
on visits to Killarney, Blarney, Glengariff and Cap- 
poquin, and the Irish-Americans who had come on 
summer pilgrimages to the "ouhld sod." 

174 



THE QUEENSTOWN BACKGROUND 

And it so proved that when the early days of 
August brought the cataclysmic opening of world- 
war these tourists and trippers produced in the Con- 
sulate our first foretaste of war work. Tammany 
judges and policemen, ladies' maids and chauffeurs, 
clerics and liquor-vendors all poured in and out of 
the Consulate in quite a continuous stream; often 
merely to learn in what way the war was likely to 
affect their personal plans, and often to apply for 
gratuitous transportation or loans. Fortunately for 
us very few of these latter applicants could fairly 
claim to need financial aid, since they all possessed 
friends or relatives in Ireland from whom to bor- 
row. We did loan money occasionally; a hundred 
pounds, for instance, to a stranded aggregation of 
Irish-American motion-picture artists who had been 
staging scenes in the Black Valley. But in the main 
our service lay in reassuring those who were over- 
timid and in impressing upon those who were over- 
bold the importance of getting back to America at 
an early date. We sent many cable messages to 
friends and kindred in America;, often through the 
medium of the Department of State. 

One general service of considerable importance the 
Consulate was able to perform for these travelers. 
The British authorities toward the end of August 

175 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 1 

readied a sudden decision to close Queenstown 
against the arrival and departure of all persons other 
than British subjects. This was in the highest de- 
gree natural, as Queenstown is both a naval and mil- 
itary center, but it meant that our throngs of Irish- 
Americans would be forced to make an awkward de- 
tour to Liverpool before they could take ship for 
home. The Consulate suggested that really the most 
expeditious way to "sterilize" the Cork "fortified 
area," and the South of Ireland in general, of aliens 
would be to drain the latter ofi rapidly through 
Queenstown instead of retarding the outflow by de- 
flecting it through Liverpool. 

This viewpoint was presently adopted, after nu- 
merous official calls, and Queenstown was held open 
for embarkations until well into November. The 
number of residents of America who availed them- 
selves of the privilege thus gained was about six 
thousand ; and their saving in money alone, in avoid- 
ing the trip to Liverpool, must have been about sev- 
enty-five thousand dollars. I think this may fairly 
be cited as one of the numerous little instances which 
show the pecuniary value of our Consular Service 
to the American tax-payer. 

In October, when the main rush of the exodus was 
dying down, a big passenger steamer bound for a 

176 I 



THE QUEENSTOWN BACKGROUND 

neutral continental port was brought into the Queens- 
town roadstead and detained over a question of con- 
traband. She carried a large and vigorous group of 
American saloon passengers, and these quickly be- 
came very restive. We got into communication with 
Ambassador Page by telegraph; and in the course 
of time the Ambassador effected an arrangement by 
which the voyage was permitted to continue. Dur- 
ing the following week the incident bade fair to be 
precisely repeated; but in this case permission was 
procured for the American and other neutral pas- 
sengers to disembark at Queenstown and proceed by 
rail and packet-boat to London. We hurried about 
after nightfall and chartered a tender on which we 
steamed out into the choppy waters of the roadstead 
and brought ashore two dozen wind-blown but high- 
spirited Americans. 

With the general discontinuance of travel by 
[Americans the consular war work took on a different 
character; concerning itself with commercial oppor- 
^nities, German interests, American freight ships, 
and intensive investigation of the claims of various 
persons to American citizenship. 

Vast commercial opportunities were opened up in 
Ireland by the cutting off of trade with the continent. 

177 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 1 

All kinds of hardware and enameled ware, glass and 
glassware, musical instruments, knitted goods, 
leather sundries and several other lines of merchan- 
dise had been coming into the Province of Munster 
— our consular district — from Germany, Belgium 
and Austria. 

Of "German subjects and interests," too, the Con- 
sulate, like all our consular offices in Allied coun- 
tries, had charge. Ireland, as is well known, was 
prior to the war filled with German waiters and ho- 
tel employees who reported — or misreported for the 
sake of pleasing their German overlords — the Irish 
political situation to Berlin. The larger share of 
these, I think, managed in one way or another to 
leave Ireland when the war came; but quite a few 
who did not do so applied to me for certificates as 
to the facts in their cases. These certificates, they 
hoped, would exonerate them from charges of "slack- 
ing" when the war ends. In cases of internment of 
Germans the British authorities, without any obli- 
gation to do so, were often so kind as to explain 
the situation to us ; and in every case they could well 
afford to explain with the utmost candor, for their 
treatment of the Germans, while thorough, was cer- 
tainly most generous. The matter of furnishing 
weekly financial relief to the dependents of interned 

178 



THE QUEENSTOWN BACKGROUND 

Germans, out of funds lodged with Ambassador Page 
at London, involved no little consular investigation 
and correspondence. 

The crews of German merchant ships captured 
by the British, and the German sailors taken from 
neutral ships, were landed from time to time in 
County Cork to be sent up to the internment camps 
at Tipperary and Oldcastle. It devolved upon us 
to collect the wages, and sometimes the effects, of 
these men, and forward them to the camps. Some 
of the German sailing vessels were owned and 
manned by the excellent type of Germans so familiar 
to Americans in America ; and it was really pathetic 
to see them parting from their pet linnets and from 
the ship's cabins which they had spent years in con- 
verting into pleasant homes. I shall always have a 
high regard, for example, for Captain Immelman, 
of the German barque Melpomene; and my wife was 
touched by the mounted specimen of the South Amer- 
ican white heron which he left in a pasteboard box 
labeled "Qriosite present for Mrs. Frost" — whom 
he had never seen. He had originally acquired it to 
be a present f or Frau Immelman back in the Father- 
land. 

It should be said that in all my rather extensive 
correspondence with these prisoners after they had 

179 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

reached the internment camps there was never an in- 
timation of complaint as to the food, quarters or 
treatment which they were receiving ; nor at the man- 
ner in which the camp Commandants administered 
the wage-funds or other funds of the Germans. 

The war brought work of still another kind to the 
Consulate by attracting American ships into the 
transatlantic trade. In the old days, before the in- 
vention of wireless telegraphy, nearly all the ships 
approaching England with grain, timber, sugar, etc., 
had to call at Queenstown for orders as to their des- 
tination; and in those days — or at least during the 
early part of them — the American merchant marine 
was large enough so that many American ships en- 
tered the Cove of Cork. But with the introduction 
of wireless and the decline of American shipping, 
Queenstown ceased to be familiar with the American 
flag; and for more than nine years before the war 
the Stars and Stripes had not been flown by a mer- 
chant ship in the harbor. Accordingly we were 
rather glad when the high freight rates resulted in 
the occasional appearance of American vessels once 
more. 

These ships, however, whatever their size or rig, 
almost always sought Queenstown because they were 

180 



THE QUEENSTOWN BACKGROUND 

in trouble of some sort ; and they claimed an amount 
of our attention disproportionately large. Two of 
them had been in collision, and two were worm-eaten 
old coasting schooners which never ought to have 
tempted the North Atlantic storms. In several cases 
there were altercations between the masters and the 
crews ; and the La Follette seaman's law in the Con- 
sulate became well-thumbed. We tried to adjudi- 
cate uprightly about such matters as duff and pork ; 
and once held a solemn cabin conclave concerning a 
little sheet-iron stove which had been bought at Brest 
to heat a draughty forecastle. The relations between 
the seamen and the local Constabulary, when the 
crews were accorded permission ashore, took a little 
watching. One American captain distinguished 
himself by several kinds of disgraceful conduct; and 
we visited the police court to hear him receive a 
richly deserved reprimand. Then there was the 
pleasanter case in which three Americans pluckily 
stayed by a tug-boat whose British officers and erew 
deserted her during a storm well out at sea. Our 
three men brought her safe to land in my district, 
and through our efforts and those of the Consulate- 
General received later a generous sum for salvage. 
The most complex and trying work of all was the 
determination of American or non-American citizen- 

181 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

ship status. Prior to the war Americans never 
thought of taking out passports for visits to Ireland ; 
but wartime exigencies and the fear among Irish- 
Americans that England might enforce military con- 
scription in Ireland made the establishment of na- 
tional status supremely important. There are scores, 
if not hundreds, of persons in the Province of Mun- 
ster who consider themselves Americans but who have 
as a matter of fact and law forfeited their American 
nationality. The Irish political troubles made the 
sifting out of these classes a pressing duty. Some- 
times a young man's nationality depended really 
upon his preexisting state of mind, and it was neces- 
sary to try to ascertain what his actual intentions 
and ideas had been when war and rebellion had not 
been to the fore. Persuasion was brought to bear 
upon our judgment in these and other cases in the 
form of various proffered gifts such as bottles of 
whiskey, banknotes, umbrellas, inkstands, and kin- 
dred miscellany ; and we could not note that the prof- 
ferers had the faintest notion of any moral aspect 
to this species of argumentum ad hominem. 



CHAPTEK n 

THE NEWS AIO) THE PEEPAKATIONS 

These were some of the wartime developments of 
the routine consular work; and while we were oc- 
cupied with them a multiude of outside features be- 
gan to bring home the realities of the war, and to 
suggest that further development which was to over- 
shadow everything else in the Consulate for more 
than two years of my incumbency. The naval ac- 
tivities in Queenstown admonished us of strenuous 
days to follow, and the military changes were inter- 
esting, too. The casualty lists from Flanders began 
to strike here and there among our Irish and Anglo- 
Irish friends and acquaintances. The cost of liv- 
ing furnished a lively topic for public persiflage and 
private ruefulness. And finally, by infinite grada- 
tions, the submarine menace began to define itself 
in our minds. 

Now and again as the winter wore on big steam- 
ships would slip quietly into port and anchor in 
the roadstead or make fast to the Deep Water Quay. 

183 



THE CRIME OF THE ^'LUSITANIA" 

Sometimes they would show oddly-shaped packages, 
tarpaulin-covered, on their decks; and when later 
on the vessels vanished over night we were allowed to 
suspect that special pains had been taken to keep 
the U-boats — in which we still hardly believed — 
from intercepting them. It was on one of these 
steamships, which chanced to carry some two-score 
Americans, that we made the acquaintance of Cap- 
tain William Thomas Turner, who three months 
later was in command of the Cunard steamer Lnisir 
tania. 

The first actual evidence of the presence of sub- 
marines off Queenstown, as nearly as I can recall, 
related to the Anglo-Calif omian. Walking into 
town one dismal winter morning along the Deep 
Water Quay I found there a big freighter with a 
curiously battered funnel and superstructures; and 
noticed Constabulary officers carrying a burlap gun- 
nysack down the gang-plank. The sack contained the 
dismembered fragments of the late Master of the 
Anglo-Calif omian; and it was followed by the mu- 
tilated corpses of eight of his staunch seamen. Al- 
fred ISToyes, in his "Open Boats," gives the wireless 
dialogue between the Anglo-Calif omian and the 
naval vessels coming to her assistance during her 
three-hour flight from the submarine ; but Mr. Noyes 

184 



THE NEWS AND THE PREPARATIONS 

does not mention that when the master was blown 
to pieces on his bridge his son stepped forward in- 
stantly and took the wheel, ultimately bringing the 
ship safe into Queenstown. 

Only one other submarine incident transpired dur- 
ing that winter, — the case of the Wayfarer. Like 
the escape of the Anglo-Calif omian, the saving of 
the Wayfarer after she had been torpedoed showed 
that the original German submarines were by no 
means as efficient as the later ones have since be- 
come. Or it may be that the incident showed merely 
the exceptional solidity of the ship's bulkheads. At 
any rate we understood that five out of the eleven 
compartments of the Wayfarer filled with water as 
a result of the submarine attack; and that the re- 
maining six compartments kept the ship afloat dur- 
ing the one-hundred-and-fifty-mile tow into Queens- 
town! 

Except for these comparatively unimportant cases, 
the LiLsitania catastrophe came upon Queenstown 
without forewarnings. I sometimes think of the en- 
tire submarine campaign as similar to some vile and 
gigantic reptile which has made its appearance head 
foremost, and whose loathesome body is still drag- 

185 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

ging itself past. The Lusitania horror was the hiss- 
ing head of the reptile. 

The fact and terms of the German warning to 
Americans against taking passage on Allied steam- 
ships were duly cabled to the United Kingdom ; and 
we read in the Cork newspapers Count von Bern- 
storff's cool statement that, "Travelers sailing in the 
war zone on ships of Great Britain and her Allies do 
so at their own risk." The reference to the Lusitama 
was obvious enough ; but personally it never entered 
my mind for a moment that the Germans would ac- 
tually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpa- 
bility of such an act seemed too blatant and raw for 
an intelligent people to take upon themselves. We 
had not realized yet the German deficiency in hu- 
man comprehensions, a deficiency based, I believe, 
upon the destruction by German economic and gov- 
ernmental conditions of the German sense of humor. 
(One often hears expressions of wonder as to how a 
people so sentimental as the Germans can be at the 
same time so cruel. My own suggestion is that both 
sentimentality and cruelty arise from absence of hu- 
mor.) Then, in addition, I did not believe that 
the submarines had yet shown any striking power 
equal to the task of attacking and destroying a ship 
as huge, well built and fast as the Lusitania, I was 

186 



THE NEWS AND THE PREPARATIONS 

not alone in my attitude; for there was among the 
general public in Queenstown, at least in the edu- 
cated classes, no apparent expectation that the threat 
was anything more than bluster. 

Accordingly the afternoon of May 7, 1915, found 
me engaged in a painstaking revision-transcription 
of a long annual commercial report upon the condi- 
tion of Counties Cork, Kerry, Tipperary, Water- 
ford, Clare and Limerick. My Vice-Consul, how- 
ever, Mr. Lewis C. Thompson, of Norfolk, Virginia, 
had formed a more correct impression of the proba- 
bilities ; and spent a good part of the day in various 
offices along the waterfront where news might be ex- 
pected to develop. At two-thirty in the afternoon 
he came hurriedly up the stairs — the American Con- 
sulate at Queenstown is on a second floor above a 
bar-room — saying that there was a wildfire rumor 
about town that the Lusitarda had been attacked. 
Stepping quickly to the windows, we could see a very 
unusual stir in the harbor ; and as we looked the har- 
bor's "mosquito fleet" of tugs, tenders and trawlers, 
some two dozen in all, began to steam past the town 
toward the harbor-mouth. 

I immediately went to the telephone and called up 
Paymaster Norcocks, the secretary to Rear-Admiral 
Sir Charles Coke, and said rather apologetically, 

187 



I 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

"I hear there is some sort of street rumor that the 
Lusitania has been attacked." I could hardly be- 
lieve my ears when the response came, "It's true, 
Mr. Erost. We fear she is gone." The stress on the 
word "true" gave me an unforgettable mental shock ; 
and I listened rather mechanically to the meager in- 
formation the Paymaster could give me — the wire- 
less message of distress, "Come at once. Big list to 
starboard. Ten miles off Kinsale," and the tele- 
phone confirmation by watchers on the shore at the 
Old Head of Kinsale that the Lusitcmla had disap- 
peared. 

I must have spent ten or fifteen minutes pacing 
the floor of the office, adjusting my mind to the fact 
of the disaster, and turning over the possible ways 
in which the Consulate could be of service. Even 
then, I am frank to say, no very definite chain of ac- 
tion came into my mind; and as a matter of fact 
throughout the days and weeks that followed our 
course was dictated almost from moment to moment 
by the circumstances that clamored about us for at- 
tention. 

My first act was to telegraph briefly to Consul- 
General Skinner and Ambassador Page at London, 
giving the astounding facts. Then I went down to 

188 



THE NEWS AND THE PREPARATIONS 

the Munster & Leinster Bank and procured a supply 
of British specie for loans. 

We all conjectured that a good share of the sur- 
vivors would land at Kinsale, a town of nearly three 
thousand people, which was only nine or ten miles 
from the scene of the sinking, while Queenstown was 
twenty-three or twenty-four miles. After serious 
hesitation as to whether I ought not personally to 
proceed to Kinsale, I decided to send Mr. Thompson. 
He took one hundred pounds and went up to Cork to 
hire an automobile, reaching Kinsale about seven 
o'clock. I had simply instructed him to do any- 
thing and everything possible for the comfort of 
the survivors, and to call on the Consulate freely for 
money or assistance. It developed, however, that only 
nine of the survivors actually landed at Kinsale ; and 
Mr. Thompson very energetically induced his chauf- 
feur to drive back to Cork in the darkness, so that 
before ten o'clock in the evening he was with us on 
the Cunard Wharf. 

Offers of assistance from local people of Ameri- 
can affiliations began to come in between four and 
five o'clock. Mrs. John Dinan, of Kjiockevin, not 
only offered to shelter survivors but had the splendid 
good-sense to send us at once a big hamper of warm 

189 



THE CRIME OF THE **LUSITANIA" 

and comfortable clothing. Mrs. Richard Townsend, 
Mrs. Benjamin Haughton, and Mrs. William Leahy 
were generous in their offers, and later on proved 
to be untiring in their efforts among the American 
lady survivors. Mrs. Frost came early to the Con- 
sulate, and during the evening twice made trips to 
our home with survivors. 

Consul William L. Jenkins, who happened fortu- 
nately to be detailed as assistant at the Dublin Con- 
sulate, called up by long distance telephone to offer 
his services; and made his appearance next morn- 
ing after an awkward night trip. Mr. John Dinan, 
Jr., American Consular Agent at Limerick, left his 
large business interests there and came down to 
Queenstown for Saturday and Sunday; and his 
brother, my friend the late Lieutenant George W. 
Dinan, then a student at Cork University, worked in 
the Consulate for several days with great sympathy 
and intelligence. 

At about six o'clock it occurred to me that pos- 
sibly Mr. Page and Mr. Skinner at London might 
not have relayed my telegraphic report to Washing- 
ton, or that the Department of State might appre- 
ciate direct reports ; and I accordingly cabled to the 
Secretary of State. From that time forward, to ob- 
viate delays, I reported by cable straight to Wash- 

190 



THE NEWS AND THE PREPARATIONS 

ington, sending the same messages, of course, by 
telegraph to my superiors at London. The practice 
thus begun continued for over two years, and ran into 
several thousand dollars in cost. Washington cer- 
tainly kept its finger on the pulse of the submarine 
campaign without any intermission, whether Ger- 
man promises were present or absent. 

The fact that no news could be procured from the 
disaster until the rescue ships arrived, since these 
ships were all too small to carry wireless, gave a 
few hours' respite for completing arrangements for 
the reception of the victims. The heaviest burden 
fell upon the Cunard Company's agent, Mr. J. J. 
Murphy, and his assistants, and they wrought mir- 
acles in organizing the hotels and lodging-houses and 
clothing-stores. The British naval and military au- 
thorities provided hospital accommodation, stretcher- 
bearers, and no little private hospitality. The Con- 
stabulary and the Queenstown civil authorities made 
morgue and hospital arrangements. The local vol- 
unteer first-aid corps were mustered; and among 
the numerous medical men who gave devoted service 
throughout the days following may be mentioned 
the late Major Crofts, R.A.M.C., the universally be- 
loved head of the Military Hospital, and Doctor 
Ralph Hodges, Doctor Richard Townsend, and Doc- 

191 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 



i 



tor William O'Connor, all of Queenstown. To my 
mind the most valuable single preparatory act of 
initiative was Captain Wallace Dickie's summons 
of the volunteer motor ambulance corps of Cork. 
Some forty or fifty automobiles came down from 
Cork as a result, under Mr. Winder, a leading Cork 
attorney, and rendered excellent service in distrib- 
uting the wounded and exhausted victims. 

At this point perhaps it may be permissible to 
take up some of the facts regarding the actual dis- 
aster itself, even though our information is not first- 
hand. The Consulate talked fully and freely with 
scores of survivors while their impressions were still 
very fresh; and we procured written narrative state- 
ments from most of the intelligent American surviv- 
ors. iTaturally, too, we took an interest in going 
carefully over the extensive testimony taken by Lord 
Mersey's commission of inquiry. Thus altogether 
perhaps as good an idea of what transpired has been 
gathered as any formed by the persons who passed 
through the disaster but had neither occasion nor op- 
portunity to gain a general perspective view of it. 



CHAPTER III 

THE OATASTKOPHE PEOPEB 

The weather conditions on that fateful Friday 
afternoon were exceptionally lovely. The wonderful 
South Irish littoral was bathed in clear spring sun- 
shine, and the sea was as smooth as a mirror. The 
ship was traveling comfortably at the rate of from 
sixteen to eighteen knots per hour, a speed dictated 
by the hours of the tides at the dangerous Liverpool 
bar. The ship's boats had been swung out, and a 
lifebelt drill had been held on the previous evening. 
It was necessary for Captain Turner to approach 
the coast long enough to take a formal landfall, be- 
cause it would have been hazardous to run clear into 
the Liverpool bar on dead reckoning only; but the 
Captain delayed this operation until the most ad- 
vantageous time of day and until he was within 
ready reach of help from Queenstown. 

Host of the passengers, including as fine an ag- 
gregation of representative Americans as the "Lucy" 
ever carried, had finished their luncheons and were 

193 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA'* 

dispersed about the decks enjoying the sunshine anc 
admiring the tender emerald-green of the Irish coast- 
line — the Old Head of Kinsale being eight miles 
off the port beam. Suddenly, at eight minutes past 
two o'clock (Greenwich Mean Time), a torpedo was 
seen leaping swiftly through the surface from the 
seaward — "cutting the water like a razor" — and 
some of the passengers even discerned the conning 
tower of a submarine about three hundred yards off 
the starboard bow. The torpedo struck between the 
third and fourth funnels, and by its exploding crash 
converted that splendid scene into the most hideous 
and criminal catastrophe that human history has 
known. 

Within thirty seconds of the impact a second ex- 
plosion took place; presumably an engine-room ex- 
plosion, since the engines were immediately put out 
of control and the lights went out all through the 
interior of the ship. The testimony as to a second 
torpedo is confusing; but in view of the prior an- 
nouncements and subsequent conduct of the Ger- 
mans a second torpedo would not strengthen our cer- 
tainty that they had determined to destroy the ship 
regardless of consequences. 

Captain Turner immediately ordered the wheel 
hard a-starboard to turn the ship to port toward the 

194 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

land; and a little later, to facilitate the taking to 
the lifeboats, sought to have the engines reversed to 
take the way off the ship. The engines failed to 
respond. The wireless operator got away the mes- 
sage to the Admiralty already quoted. 

On account of the speed at which the ship's mo- 
mentum was still carrying her forward, Captain 
Turner judged it best not to attempt for the time 
being to launch the lifeboats. He had every reason 
for believing that his fine ship would remain afloat 
much longer than she did. A little later, when the 
speed was flagging, he ordered the starboard boats 
to be lowered; but the confusion had by that time 
become great. 

Confidence in the Lusitania's floating capacity 
was based upon her special construction. In most ' 
steamers, as the reader knows, a series of cross-walls 
divide the ship into cross-sections, so that if the hull 
is pierced the water can flood into only one or two 
sections. In the Lusitania, in order to make this 
protection still more positive, there were not only 
these "transverse bulkheads" but also "longitudinal 
bulkheads," or walls running lengthwise through the 
ship along the coal bunkers. Thus the water, upon 
entering, was not only confined to certain cross-sec- 
tions but also to a single side of these sections. This 

195 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA'» | 

arrangement has been known as "battleship construc- 
tion," because the idea originated with Navy design- 
ers. It results in increasing the buoyancy of the 
stricken ship but also in increasing the sharpness or 
steepness of any list or cant which she may assume. 
In the case of the LiLsitania this extreme list — ^which 
at one time was not less than forty degrees — seems 
to have been fatal, because it is believed to have 
brought certain apertures in the ship's side beneath 
the waterline. But any board of experienced nauti- 
cal men or marine architects would have believed 
precisely as Captain Turner did that the Lusitania, 
wounded as she was, would remain afloat far longer 
than eighteen minutes. The Titanic experience is 
really irrelevant. 

To the eternal credit of humanity stands the ab- 
sence of panic and terror when the Lusitania was 
foundering. Mr. Erohman's noble remark that 
"Death is the most fascinating adventure in life"; 
Mr. Vanderbilt's efforts in saving women and chil- 
dren; and Staff-Captain Anderson's self-immolation 
in getting away the starboard lifeboats — all are per- 
fectly typical of the air of calm energy which pre- 
vailed. The contradictory evidence on this point is 
negligible. The overwhelming testimony is that the 

196 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

catastrophe was a large-scale proof of the innate 
courage of the human heart. 

But of confusion, of chaos, of disorder, there were 
inevitably superabundant evidences. Unskilled pei>- 
sons in attempting to handle the falls or pulleys 
which lowered the lifeboats made awful failures; 
and several boats were released at one end only, spill- 
ing their occupants out into the sea. Other boats 
were never freed from the davits at all, and were 
therefore dragged down with their occupants when 
the ship sank. Still other boats were broken by 
lurching inboard or against the side of the vessel. 
Eor example, the second port boat swung in against 
the deck-wall of the smoking-room, and crushed to 
death or hopelessly crippled some thirty or forty pas- 
sengers who were huddled together waiting for its 
preparation. In none of these accidents can strong 
blame be imputed to the persons on board the Lusir 
tania. Probably instances did occur in which better 
judgment might have saved lives; but on the whole 
the standard of conduct not only as to courage but as 
to seK-possession and resourcefulness was amazingly 
high. 

The most heart-piercing scenes were enacted. 
Husbands beheld their wives crushed and flung 
hurtling like debris. Gentle elderly ladies such as 

197 



THE CRIME OF T1HE "LUSITANIA" j 

Mrs. Elbert Hubbard met death with quiet and pa- 
thetic dignity; and I want to insist that they did 
not merely die, but were killed. The multiplication 
of murder does not make it any the less murder; 
and if a personal enemy of yours should deliberately 
ride down in a motor car your gray-haired mother 
and dash her brains out on the pavement his crime 
would be identical with that perpetrated against the 
gentlewomen on the Lusitania. 

Men with broken limbs calmly strove in the water 
to preserve not only their own lives but the lives of 
others. Little children drowned in speechless terror 
while looking into the very eyes of their powerless 
mothers. Many of these people were our fellow- 
countrymen; and the fact that they do not happen 
to have been relatives or friends is purely fortuitous. 

The vessel steadied herself onto a fairly even keel 
about ten minutes after the torpedo explosion, pre- 
sumably because the water broke its way across into 
the port side. But before sinking she gradually re- 
sumed her list to starboard, and in disappearing she 
lurched heavily in this direction. More than one- 
half, probably, of her occupants were at this time — 
twenty-six minutes past two o'clock — still on her 
decks or seated in unlaunched lifeboats ; although per- 
haps this estimate should include part of the numer- 

198 



I 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

ous persons who were swimming in the water in the 
lee of the stagnating hull. At all events a large num- 
ber of men and women were hurled into the water 
by the lurch which just preceded the foundering, 
or flung themselves into the sea just previously to it ; 
and they were followed by a shower of spars, chairs, 
and various deck-litter which stunned and killed 
many of them. 

The Lusitania sank bow foremost; and her pro- '^ 
pellers were even at one time slightly above the water, 
since some of the lifeboats took hold of them in push- 
ing off. At the last, the weight of evidence shows, 
the stern projected at an abrupt angle. One survivor 
told me very vividly of standing high on the stern 
after the bow had partly disappeared and gazing 
down sixty feet or more upon the impotent swarms 
of human creatures twisting crazily like flies under- 
neath and upon the surface of the clear green sea. 
It seems probable that the prow touched the sea-''"' 
floor before the stern sank. The depth of the sea 
was only sixty fathoms, or three hundred and sixty 
feet, at the spot of the foundering; and this is just 
one-half the length of the ship. The feebleness of 
the suction in the vortex surprised many witnesses. 

The reverse force after the vortex, on the other 
hand — a sort of regurgitation by the ocean of hu- 

199 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

man bodies and debris — astonished tbe survivors by 
its violence. Interior explosions seem to have taken 
place in the ship as she sank; and they not only 
killed many people directly but probably also ac- 
counted for the great eruptive force with which 
swimmers, corpses, deck-chairs, oars, and a large 
mass of wreckage were shot churning upwards to the 
surface. The danger of being crushed or injured 
during this phase of the disaster was much greater 
than during the suction phase which had preceded 
it. A swimmer looking back describes the spot as 
"a mound of water," foaming above the general level 
of the sea for an appreciable space of time. A cu- 
rious minor-keyed sound of horror issued from and 
sprang along the water, almost as though the sea 
itself, they said, were moaning in conscious revul- 
sion. It was of course merely the blending of human 
cries of fright and pain, in which the treble of 
women's voices was a constituent. 

The rotary twist taken in the final plunge caused 
the huge funnels and the wireless antennas to bear 
down upon and mutilate and kill large numbers of 
people in the water. My friend, Mr. Frederick J. 
Gauntlett, told me of being caught in the back by 
a descending aerial and being carried forty feet be- 
low the surface before he could turn himself around 

200 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

to get his hands on the wire and free himself. Cap- 
tain Turner, who was determined, despite his sixty- 
two years of age, to go down on his bridge like a 
true British master-mariner, is said to have calcu- 
lated his danger from the wireless aerials with the 
greatest coolness. As the water closed about him he 
felt his way up along the mast by means of the flag- 
halyards, and when he judged himself near the net- 
work of wires he kicked strongly out from the mast 
and was able to come free of them to the surface. 
Young Mr. Adams, of Chicago, describes how a col- 
lapsible boat which he was just planning to get into 
commission was cut in two like so much paper by 
the sweep of a descending wire. 

There is quite a little testimony to the effect that 
the German submarine emerged for a brief interval 
at this juncture, to survey the scene, submerging 
again rather promptly; but the fact cannot be re- 
garded as well established, and — newspaper para- 
graphs to the contrary — I have never alluded to this 
circumstance in discussing the disaster either pub- 
licly or privately. 

Most of the lifeboats which remained afloat, some 
sixteen in all, counting the collapsible boats, now 
returned over the scene of the foundering; although 

201 



.THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

one or two of them which could have taken in more 
survivors made off rather discreditably toward the 
land. Dozens of men performed prodigies in utiliz- 
ing the collapsible boats and rescuing their less for- 
tunate fellow-passengers. Lord Mersey singles out 
an eighteen-year-old British sailor boy, Leslie !N". 
Morton, whose pluck and vigor saved many lives; 
and there were of course many other persons whose 
conduct cannot but excite unstinted admiration. If 
I were asked to furnish an honor-roll of American 
survivors who behaved with special heroism I should 
name Mrs. Theodore I^aish, William McMullen 
Adams (aet. nineteen years), James H. Brooks, 
Frederick J. Gauntlett, Charles E. Lauriat, Jr., and 
Isaac Lehmann ; and doubtless a fuller knowledge of 
the facts might expand this list considerably. 

The collapsible lifeboats had for the most part 
been unfastened from their places by the ship's sea- 
men during the brief moments before the sinking; 
and this type of boats must have accounted for at 
least one-third of all the life-saving. There were 
exciting scenes as efforts were made to get them prop- 
erly opened and mounted in the water while swarms 
of exhausted swimmers were crowding about them 
and onto them. It is hard for a timid person, un- 
accustomed to remaining in the water, to realize the 

202 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

necessity and practicability of waiting while adjust- 
ments are being made; but nevertheless calmness 
and courage were the general rule. In a striking 
number of instances the disaster resulted in the sur- 
vival of the physically fittest; but these persons did 
not save themselves at the expense of others. On 
the contrary their self-preservation was usually or 
often incidental to their efforts to save others. 

The scenes among the debris cast up from the 
wreck were so excruciating as to defy description. 
Drowned bodies of women and children were nu- 
merous, and many had been mangled or disfigured 
in the surge and grinding of the wreckage so as to 
stain the ocean with blood. A British survivor 
heavily bandaged from an operation performed in 
America told me of clinging to a waterlogged boat 
and watching the drowning struggles of a group com- 
posed of a woman and infant and a gray-bearded, 
feeble old man. Overcrowded lifeboats passed 
friends or relatives of their occupants and helplessly 
saw these dear ones slip beneath the surface from 
prostration or injuries. Some corpses bore life-pre- 
servers improperly fastened, so that they floated with 
only the lower part of the body exposed. 

A British lady was sucked down a smokestack, and 
then when the water met the fires was expelled by 

203 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

the steam with great violence. Much of her cloth- 
ing was torn from her person, and she was so be- 
grimed with soot and cinders that her own husband 
did not recognize her an hour or so later when she 
hailed him from a neighboring boat. An American 
business man, fighting his way through the wreck- 
age to the surface, felt himself wrapped and snared 
by ropes, as he supposed, but used his arms to raise 
himself to the air. Once on the surface it developed 
that the supposed ropes were the clinging arms of 
three different people. The entire group was saved. 
Elbert Hubbard, according to a very responsible 
American friend, found himself alone in the water 
after the Lusitania had sunk, and swam to a cylin- 
drical steel drum broken out from the corner of a 
life-raft The water, although not frigid, was sharply 
chilly ; and as he felt himself growing numb he made 
a stout struggle to climb up onto the cylinder. By 
the time he had been able to throw his weight across 
it, the cylinder revolved slowly in the water and 
plunged him off on the other side. He tried this a 
second time and a third time, with the same result 
of being thrown off by the rotating of the cylinder 
under his weight. By this time the shock and ex- 
posure and struggle had proved too much for our 
genial veteran philosopher; his strength failed him, 

204 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

his hands slipped from the drum, and he sank half- 
conscious to his death. The liftboat from which this 
incident was witnessed was preoccupied with its own 
difficulties and with other rescue work at the time; 
but somehow I fancy that the big-hearted Fra would 
hardly have chosen to die otherwise than as he did, 
much as he would deplore the interruption of his 
life-work at a time when it was never of greater 
service to his country. 

A lifeboat rowing about had its attention caught 
by an intermittent flashing light on an undulation 
of the sea several rods away, and proceeded to the 
spot largely out of curiosity. It found a circular 
lifebuoy clasped by the hand of a drowned lady 
whose body depended entirely beneath the surface. 
But on one of the two or three unsubmerged fingers 
a great diamond was flashing in the sunlight. The 
possession of this valuable bauble saved from an un- 
known ocean resting-place the remains of a distin- 
guished American lady chemist, who was journeying 
to England to meet King George and other eminent 
people. 

Before resuming the thread of events at the ar- 
rival of the rescue ships from Queenstown, it may 
be well to summarize the loss of life and property 

205 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

resulting from the disaster. The property loss 
was of course severe. The reader perhaps recalls 
that the Lusitania was one-seventh of a mile — seven 
hundred and sixty-nine feet — in length; and had a 
width of eighty-eight feet, a depth of sixty feet, a 
displacement of 41,400 tons, and an indicated horse- 
power of sixty-eight thousand. The combined value 
of the huge ship and her cargo on this last voyage, 
the Cunard Company tell me, was nearly eleven mil- 
lion dollars. It is doubtful if any of the most pre- 
tentious hotels in the United States would constitute, 
if destroyed to-day by a sudden earthquake, a prop- 
erty loss equal to the Lusitdnia's, 

One may go further and say that probably the 
loss of life, if the New Willard Hotel at Washington 
were to be engulfed in the earth, would be less im- 
portant both quantitatively and qualitatively than 
was the loss of life from the Lusitania. The ship's 
passenger list was 1,265 persons, and the crew num- 
bered 694 persons, so that the ship carried just short 
of two thousand souls — 1,959 to be precise. Of this 
two thousand practically twelve hundred — 1,195 — 
persons perished. The dead comprised, in round 
numbers, eight hundred men, three hundred women, 
and one hundred children; and of the children, 
thirty-five were infants in arms. It should be em- 

206 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

phasized that the percentage of the crew saved was 
virtually the same as the percentage of the passen- 
gers — viz., 42 per cent of the crew and 37.5 per cent 
of the passengers — and this in spite of the fact that 
the crew were all able-bodied males while the pas- 
sengers were more than two-fifths women and chil- 
dren. Certainly the crew did nobly toward saving 
passengers. 

Coming to the figures for American citizens, we 
find that out of 189 Americans on board the Lusir 
tania 123 were killed or drowned, and only 66 sur- 
vived to tread solid earth again. The American 
death-roster included, among others, Elbert Hub- 
bard, Charles Frohman, Charles Klein, and Justus 
Miles Forman, as men of letters or arts; Alfred G. 
Vanderbilt, Harry J. Keser, A. C. BiEcke, William 
S. Hodges, Albert L. Hopkins, and — greatest of all 
who died in the disaster — Dr. J. S. Pearson, as busi- 
ness men; and Lindpn W._ Bates, Herbert S. Stone, 
Mrs. R. D. Shymer, and Captain James Blaine Mil- 
ler, as persons distinguished in various ways. Most 
of these persons are too well known to warrant any 
comment; but possibly some of them were not so 
familiar to the general American public as they 
might well have been. 

Lindon W. Bates was the first assistant and right- 
207 



THE CRIME OF THE **LUSITANIA" 

hand man of Mr. Hoover in tlie Belgian Relief Com- 
mission work. His clear-headed efficiency and energy 
would have been literally beyond money value to the 
United States at the present time if he had been 
spared to remain at Mr. Hoover's side. A. C. Bil- 
icke was one of the wealthiest and most publio- 
spirited citizens of Los Angeles, and had been a 
leader in many forward-looking enterprises, both in- 
dustrial and humanitarian, on the Pacific Coast 
Herbert S. Stone, son of Melville Stone of the Asso- 
ciated Press, was a man of marked gifts and physical 
and mental vitality, already on the road to a sub- 
stantial independent reputation. Captain J. B. 
Miller, of the United States Coast and Geodetic Sur- 
vey — "Zeke" Miller we used to call him wlien he 
was a football hero at Oberlin — was one of the most 
useful and promising officers in the Survey. 

I have, of course, expressed my own personal 
opinion in referring to Dr. J. S. Pearson as the 
greatest man who perished from the Lusitania. This 
eminent American business man was president of 
the Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding Com- 
pany, and had carried through large electric-power 
undertakings in Mexico, the Argentine, and finally 
in old Spain. He represented in its perfection, I 
believe, the finest type produced by our nation at its 

208 



THE CATASTROPHE PROPER 

present stage of development, the type of the con- 
structive idealist, the business pioneer and industrial 
creative genius. And his abilities would unques- 
tionably have contributed greatly to meeting the 
present crisis in American tonnage-construction had 
he not perished. 



CHAPTER IV 

EESCUE AND BELIEF WOEK 

The rescue craft from Queenstown began to reach 
the scattered lifeboats and flotsam from the Lilsv- 
tania between five and six o'clock. Some of the life- 
boats had reached fishing-boats a few miles off Kin- 
sale before the tugs arrived, and their passengers had 
to be retransferred to the latter. The steamship 
Katarina, flying the Greek flag, had also appeared 
on the scene and picked up the occupants of two or 
three lifeboats, which she turned over to the rescue 
fleet. Several times the Queenstown boats were met 
with the hail, "We're all right. Go on to the others !'' 

Probably no person, who was still alive at the time 
the help arrived, was left in the water to die, as 
several of the tugs and tenders beat back and forth 
across the sea for two or three hours. Of course 
the coma which follows numbing in the chilly water 
resembles death very closely. During the hours pre- 
ceding rescue quite a few apparently drowned per- 
sons were taken into the lifeboats and resuscitated; 

210 



RESCUE AND RELIEF WORK 

and there were some startling cases of this on board 
the tugs en route to Queenstown. I saw one hand- 
some young woman at Queenstown who had been 
dragged out from a pile of corpses on a rescue ship 
because of a flutter of the eyelids. She seemed none 
the worse for her experience. On the other hand, 
two or three survivors passed away between the time 
they were rescued and the arrival at Queenstown. 

The rough and cordial kindness shown by the sea- 
men of the rescue fleet was much commented upon 
by the survivors. These craft had gone out so hast- 
ily that they were not equipped with many relief 
appliances ; but they were able to supply shelter, heat, 
rude clothing, and warm drink to a majority of the 
survivors who needed them ; and the crews vied witH 
one another in giving spontaneously their garments, 
food and even money to the unfortunates whom they 
were saving. The impulses toward pity and help- 
fulness which the disaster universally inspired in 
Ireland found their first, and very fitting, outward 
manifestation or expression in the acts of the men 
of the Queenstown harbor fleet. 

We saw the ghastly procession of these rescue ships 
as they landed the living and the dead that night 
under the flaring gas torches along the Queenstown 

211 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

water-front. The arrivals began soon after eight 
o'clock and continued at close intervals until about 
eleven o'clock. Ship after ship would come up out 
of the darkness, and sometimes two or three could 
be just descried awaiting their turns in the cloudy 
night, to discharge bruised and shuddering women, 
crippled and half-clothed men, and a few wide-eyed 
little children whose minds were still revolving 
blankly this new experience of human existence of 
God's footstool. Women caught at our sleeves and 
begged desperately for word of their husbands; and 
men with choking efforts at matter-of-factness moved 
ceaselessly from group to group, seeking a lost daugH- 
ter or sister or even bride. Piles of corpses like 
cordwood began to appear among the paint-kegs and 
coils of rope on the shadowy old wharves. Every 
voice in that great mixed assemblage was pitched in 
unconscious undertones, broken now and then by 
painful coughing-fits or suppressed hysteria. 

The intention was to have all the boats land at 
the Cunard Wharf and the wharf next to it; but 
as the process of discharging wounded or prostrated 
survivors was sometimes rather lengthy and toil- 
some, two or three of the boats, upon their own initia- 
tive, landed at neighboring wharves where no ar- 
rangements had been made to meet them. In all 

212 



RESCUE AND RELIEF WORK 

tKe cases, however, some member of the Consulate's 
staff managed to hail the boats as they drew in, and 
ito get from their commanders or from some respon- 
sible persons an estimate of the number of survivors 
and corpses on board. Thus shortly after elevea 
o'clock we cabled to the Department of State pro- 
visional total estimates which stood for a day or two 
as the only ones available. The Cunard Company 
was unwilling to give out any estimate until they 
could be sure that it was approximately correct. 

,We first requested the various registrars to pro- 
cure the nationality of each registrant, and then at 
intervals, as time could be found amid the welfare 
work, we made the rounds of the desks and copied 
off the names of the Americans as they appeared. 
The lists thus built up were cabled from time to time 
to Washington, and although the orthography was 
often defective — and sometimes the nationality in- 
correct — the margin of error was not so great as we 
feared at the time. Several American survivors vol- 
unteered their aid in our tasks, and proved devoted 
and useful from the moment they stepped onto the 
wharves. Through these and through such officials 
as could give the matter attention we passed the 
word around that all Americans should report at the 
Consulate on the following — Saturday — morning. 

213 



THE CRIME OF THE **LUSITANIA" 

There were two or three Americans, I regret to say, 
and a number of persons of other nationalities, who 
landed without injury or exhaustion and straight- 
way proceeded to the best hotel at Cork and thence 
on their way to London without so much as a back- 
ward glance or a thought of pity for their companions 
in the tragedy. 

There was little immediate physical assistance 
which the Consulate could extend. Lodging and fooj 
and clothing were amply provided by the Cunard 
Company, and the Kaval and Military authorities. 
Scores of the private residents of Queenstown took 
survivors into their homes utterly irrespective of na- 
tionality. Many Americans were guests in British 
and Irish houses, and in the same way it happened 
that the American colony — if that word can be ap- 
plied to so small a group of people — entertained a 
number of British subjects. 

It is doubtless true that the quarters supplied at 
some of the lodging-houses were not quite what we 
were anxious to provide ; but there is a limit to what 
a town of ten thousand people, nearly all working- 
people, can provide in this direction upon less than 
six hours' notice. It was observable, also, that such 
complaints as reached our ears were mainly from 

214 



RESCUE AND RELIEF WORK 

survivors from those rescue ships which landed at 
wharves they had been asked to avoid. 

The distribution of survivors for the night pro- 
ceeded with much expedition. Considerably before 
midnight the Cunard officers were almost empty of 
the agitated and pitiable refugees who had over- 
flowed them two hours earlier. The blanket-wrapped 
or underwear-clad figures, the rolling eyes of the ex- 
citable foreign survivors, the bandages and slings, 
and the hoarse voices and hacking coughs of sufferers 
from exposure — all these elements of the weird and 
unforgettable scene vanished away in an incredibly 
brief space of time, it seemed to us. 

Between midnight and morning the principal offi- 
cial activities consisted in having the corpses — of 
which some 160 were brought ashore with the sur- 
vivors — laid out in the three improvised morgues, 
and in arranging transportation for the living on the 
following day. 

At about two o'clock in the morning we turned our 
attention to ascertaining the facts as to how the dis- 
aster took place — hour of the day, absence of warn- 
ing, speed, weather, measures toward safety, and the 
like. Very few capable witnesses could be found 
still awake and available ; but by four o'clock we had 

215 



THE CRIME OF THE *^USITANIA" 

managed to cable a resume eufficiently full for gen- 
eral provisional purposes. 

By five o'clock I was in bed and asleep ; and I did 
not reach the Consulate again until eight-thirty Sat- 
urday morning. I have seen frequent statements to 
the effect that I got no sleep for several days after 
the Lusiiania disaster ; but although this was the case 
in one or two subsequent disasters, it does not happen 
to be true as to the Lusitaniou It is a fact that we 
saw daylight lighten the sky for several mornings, 
and even during June we were still working until 
midnight; but we always took pains to get the maxi- 
mum possible amount of rest, as any sensible men 
would have done in the same circumstances. The 
consular work entailed by the Lusitania tragedy 
reached its peak some six weeks after the event ; and 
probably was occupying a full half of our time at 
the end of the year in December. Our bound corre- 
spondence in the case constitutes about twelve inches 
of solid reading-matter, and any person familiar with 
office work will realize what that means. 

During Saturday our primary attention was to the 
instant needs of the American survivors. The great 
majority of the Americans reported at the Consulate 
in the course of the day. 

216 



RESCUE AND RELIEF WORK 

The first effort of the Cunard and !N"aval officials 
was naturally to forward the able-bodied survivors 
to their homes, or English destinations, at the 
earliest possible moment; and the majority of the 
victims left Queenstown by the afternoon or evening 
trains on Saturday. The Great Southern & Western 
Railway officials with great foresight took the full 
names and addresses of each survivor to whom trans- 
portation was issued ; and these lists were useful later 
in checking up and amplifying our own. 

One feature of the work at the Consulate on Sat- 
urday consisted in the loaning of small sums of 
money to Americans who needed it temporarily ; and 
our inquiries as to the need were not too searching. 
We took the addresses, and the personal promissory 
notes, of the persons involved, and disposed of about 
one hundred and forty pounds sterling. I think 
about one hundred pounds of this was eventually re- 
turned. Some of the poorer survivors took the atti- 
tude that their injuries entitled them to reparation 
from the Government, and evidently thought it just 
not to return the money they had borrowed. The 
loans were a great convenience to all concerned ; and 
Ambassador Page and the Department of State very 
promptly and fully backed up the Consulate in all 
such special disbursements, not only as to loans but 

217 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

as to attention to American corpses and advertise- 
ments and rewards concerning the salving of bodies. 
Whenever possible we of course extended relief in 
the form of -clothing or of minor personal attentions 
in cases of illness or wounds. 

The Consulate had been immediately instructed 
by Mr. Bryan, then Secretary of State, to procure 
more or less formal statements from the American 
survivors, in order that the circumstances of the 
crime might promptly rest upon written evidence. 
Accordingly the preparation of statements was one 
of the matters which we had to urge upon the sur- 
vivors even from the first. At the outset the narra- 
tives procured were rather brief and elliptical; but 
in the course of two or three days some fifteen or 
twenty quite full and reliable American statements 
were secured, and eventually this number was almost 
doubled. The facts as to the disaster, in my judg- 
ment, can be drawn from this material quite ade- 
quately and satisfactorily; and if ever published it 
will form a companion-piece to the report of the 
Mersey Commission of Inquiry. 

The work of assisting survivors in ascertaining 
whether their relatives or companions on the lost ves- 
sel had been saved was the most distressing of our 

218 



RESCUE AND RELIEF WORK 

duties. We were quickly overwlielnied with inquiries 
about missing relatives, not only from Americans but 
from persons of British and other nationalities. 
Widows, widowers, parents, orphans, brothers and 
friends of deceased victims crowded the Consulate 
steadily for three or four days; and in some cases 
appeared daily for weeks after the tragedy. When 
the relatives and friends from London and the con- 
tinent reached Queenstown, and the cabled inquiries 
from America began to accumulate, the nimiber of 
specific inquiries upon the Consulate, with descrip- 
tions of the missing persons, mounted up into the 
hundreds. The personal visits from bereaved people 
were often poignant to the last degree, especially 
when such visits came to be repeated time after time, 
at intervals of hours or days, with increasing hope- 
lessness and grief as the absence of news became 
tantamount to certainty of death. 

Without mentioning the names of these stricken 
Americans, to spread their private sorrows out for 
public inspection, I must mention two or three of the 
cases which will always stand out in my memory. An 
American business man who had in middle life been 
married to a beautiful and comparatively young wife 
came over from London to learn her fate and that of 
the two sturdy little sons whom she was bringing 

219 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

over to him. Not a particle of information was ever 
forthcoming even as to their having been seen after 
the ship was struck, to say nothing of their deaths 
or the recovery of their bodies; and the tragic spec- 
tacle of that father and husband, whose entire life 
had been wrapped up in his family, haunted the Con- 
sulate for a fortnight. Another case was that of an 
American father and mother who had lost two beau- 
tiful little daughters, and who were notably devoted 
in their efforts at least to have the bodies recovered. 
I^othing could be accomplished, however, and their 
hopeless depression was pitiable. 

An incident which illustrates the agonizing qual- 
ity of the days through which Queenstown was living 
is that of the Blank families. Two married couples 
by the same name were among the saloon passengers 
of the Lusitania, and by a caprice of fate in one case 
the husband and in the other the wife was saved. At 
different houses in Queenstown these mismated sur- 
vivors were for quite a time buoyed up in their re- 
cuperation by the assurance that their wife or hus- 
band respectively had been saved. Only after a day 
or more, I was told, were they brought together to 
confront one another in a sickening realization that 
in each case their nearest and dearest had been taken 
instead of spared. 

220 



RESCUE AND RELIEF WORK 

One widow whose husband had been an admirable 
and charming American man of aflFairs seemed to be 
completely unnerved by her loss. Her sorrow re- 
minded me of that of a child, so utter and blind did 
it seem. Her mind, her friends state, has never 
quite recovered from the shock; and her character 
has altered permanently. Another American widow 
whose loss was equally severe was fortified by an 
earnest and consecrated piety, which made her con- 
stancy of grief perhaps even harder to witness, so 
rapt was her spirit. I cannot imagine a more com- 
plete exemplification of the consolations which re- 
ligion affords to its votaries. 

A fine anodyne against sorrow was the volunteer 
personal relief work carried on by some whose per- 
sonal losses had been cruel. A stalwart young Amer- 
ican university man, for example, who had lost an 
elder brother, plunged heart and soul into the work 
of having the utmost possible number of bodies re- 
covered, partly in the hope of finding his brother^s 
corpse, and his cooperation with the Consulate in 
scattering reward posters and keeping in touch with 
the fisherpeople and other lifesaving agencies along 
the Cork and Kerry coasts by means of a motorcycle 
was a positive godsend to us. 

Another survivor, who, however, lost only friends 
221 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

on the Lusitaniay proved indefatigable in conduct- 
ing relief work. He appeared to consider that his 
own preservation imposed upon him a debt to his fel- 
low-beings ; and expended time, energy, sympathy and 
money around Queenstown with the utmost freedom 
for ten days after the disaster. At the time the ship 
was sunk he had been suffering from a severe cold, 
and moreover during the three hours which he spent 
in the water his legs had been badly scraped by 
wreckage ; but he limped indomitably about the town, 
except for two days in bed when his legs became in- 
flamed, and in several matters was very helpful to 
the Consulate. 



CHAPTEK V 



DEALING WITH THE DEAD 



The American newspaper correspondents arrived 
in Queenstown from London on Saturday noon, and 
we were very glad to have them promptly make the 
Consulate their rendezvous. After my three years 
of absence from America it was pleasant to come into 
contact again with a group of keen and well-grained 
Americans ; and it is my impression that the "stories" 
cabled to most of the metropolitan newspapers in 
America must have been quite sane and dependable. 
!N^orman Hapgood came over to Queenstown to pros- 
ecute inquiries for the body of his friend, Justus 
Miles Forman, but I think made no direct journal- 
istic use of his visit. 

One or two of the reporters for the semi-sensa- 
tional type of American journals were perhaps a 
little over-eager to pick up "human interest stuff," 
and telegraphed verbal pictures of disconsolateness 
and neediness which gave incorrect impressions. 
The story about the pathetic neglect of the body of 

223 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" ^ 

Charles Frolmian belongs in this category; and this^ 
brings me back to our tasks in connection with the; 
American corpses. 

By Saturday afternoon I began to have opportunity 
to divert a few minutes' attention from the living; 
to the dead. Vice Consul Thompson had by that time i 
secured a fairly accurate list of identified American 
bodies, and we began telegraphing for instructions 
from relatives as to the disposition of these, espe- 
cially whether it was desired that they be embalmed 
and shipped home or be buried at Queenstown, or 
be shipped in leaden caskets without embalming. The 
cabling process seemed to be discouragingly slow as 
to results, although the Department of State aided 
greatly. 

There were a number of bodies of important 
Americans which we saw at once ought indisputably 
to be embalmed and returned to the United States; 
and at different times during Saturday afternoon and 
evening I must have spent a couple of hours tele- 
phoning to various medical and undertaking offices. 
The process of preserving dead bodies seems to be 
relatively unnecessary in the United Kingdom, owing 
to the coolness of the climate and the shortness of the 

224 



DEALING WITH THE DEAD 

distances over which corpses have to be shipped in 
the small territory of the British Isles. 

By Saturday midnight, therefore, which was 
within a few hours of the time when we could de- 
cently turn our attention to the problem, Mr. Froh- 
man's body was provided for. On Sunday our sur- 
geon came down from Cork with materials and as- 
sistants, and set up an improvised operating room to 
the rear of the Cunard offices, and for five days he 
or his assistants were constantly occupied. Twice I 
visited this work-room on business errands, and I 
shall never forget the sight I saw the second time — 
the body on the embalmer's slab of a beautiful Amer- 
ican girl who was scarcely ten days a bride at the 
time of her murder by the Germans. She lay like 
a statue typifying assassinated innocence. 

On Sunday we continued to make the Consulate, 
as far as possible, a medium of exchange for infor- 
mation between the survivors, relatives of victims, 
steamship offices, press and Government. On Sun- 
day noon Captain A. Miller and Captain W. A. 
Castle, U. S. A., then special military attaches to the 
American Ambassador at London, reached Queens- 
town on his behalf; and their active sympathy and 
helpfulness among all classes of survivors formed an 

225 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

unfailing source for gratitude on the part of every 
American during the next four days. On Sunday 
afternoon we went, with Consul Jenkins, to pay offi- 
cial respects to Admiral Coke; and that interview 
was extremely interesting. «j 

We had now formulated the policy that all identi- 
fied first-cabin American dead should be embalmed, 
deeming it better to err on the safe side; and that 
all other identified American bodies should be sealed 
into leaden caskets so that they could be returned 
to America whenever desired. This policy Captains 
Castle and Miller indorsed on behalf of the Em- 
bassy, thus sharing the financial responsibility. 

Mr. Thompson had meanwhile been wrestling with 
the problem of procuring suitable caskets. All the 
good caskets in stock at Cork and Queenstown were 
instantly absorbed by the demand; and we found 
that for a good share of the bodies leaden cases must 
be specially constructed at Cork — a process quicker 
and less expensive than sending to London. 

It ought to be stated that in general the American 
relatives on behalf of whom these steps were taken 
proved to be more than ready to repay the expendi- 
tures, unduly large as the latter must have seemed to 
them. In a very few cases of mistaken nationality, 
or where religion made the embalming ceremonially 

226 



DEALING WITH THE DEAD 

objectionable, the expenses had ultimately to be as- 
sumed by the Department of State. 

The work among the corpses brought innumerable 
gruesome and moving sights and incidents. The 
temporary morgues were at the Town Hall, the 
Cunard Wharf and a disused ship chandlery on Har- 
bor Kow; and the survivors exhibited a general dis- 
taste for visiting these places to identify such bodies 
as they might be able to. The morgues were all three 
very dimly lighted, and were invariably filled with 
silent police officers making up lists of descriptions 
and effects, and with silent or sobbing relatives of 
missing dead persons. I hardly think a dozen Amer- 
icans could be got to give their services toward aid- 
ing in identifications; and in several cases we had to 
accompany these people bodily to see that they did 
not shirk this duty. . 

I saw five or six drowned women with drowned 
babies in their arms; and the corpse of one mother 
who had a dead infant clasped to each of the cold 
breasts which had so recently been their warm nest- 
ling-places. There was a curious effacement of social 
or mental distinction by death, and we often be- 
lieved a corpse to be important when it turned out to 
be decidedly the opposite. The conmionest expres- 

227 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

sion was one of reassured tranquillity, yet witK an 
undertone of puzzlement or aggrievement as though 
some trusted friend had played a practical joke which 
the victim did not yet understand. And to judge 
from their countenances the humblest stokers and 
stewardesses had found the same peace and quietness, 
the same hereafter, as had Mr. Trohman and Dr. 
Pearson. 

We contracted a temporary horror of any recum- 
bent body, and especially of sleeping children, after 
a few days among these tiers of corpses. Several 
weeks after the disaster, one night out at my home, I 
went into a bedroom with a lighted match and came 
unexpectedly upon the sleeping form of my own little 
daughter. I give you my word I recoiled as though 
I had found a serpent. That innocent figure had 
thrust me back automatically into the presence of 
those poor livid little midget-corpses at which we had 
looked down so often among the Lusitania dead. Of 
course any one of those corpses might have been that 
of my young lady if we had happened to be crossing 
at that time. For that matter, any one of them might 
have been your daughter, reader, if your concerns 
had just then taken you onto the high seas, the com- 
mon highway made by the Almighty for all nations. 

228 



DEALING WITH THE DEAD 

While careful descriptions of the unidentified dead 
had been taken, the matter of photographing them 
before interment bade fair to be overlooked for a 
time; but Consul Jenkins, among a multitude of in- 
conspicuous acts of service, called attention to this 
need and succeeded in having a complete set of photo- 
graphs made. These photographs are to be seen at 
the Cunard offices at Boston and N"ew York, and have 
been very helpful in the identifications which have 
been made since the burials. All in all, the Cunard 
records state, only sixty-five of the Lusitania dead 
remain unidentified, although some one hundred and 
forty unknown bodies were originally buried in the 
great pits at Queenstown. 

The funeral of these nameless victims took place 
on Monday afternoon, with a large representation 
of military, naval, and civil officials, and with 
throngs of sympathetic Irish people. The burial took 
place in three "mass-graves" (or collective graves) 
which had been dug at the western end of the Queens- 
town General Cemetery by volunteer squads of Brit- 
ish soldiers under the direction of Colonel Ducrot. 
The Cemetery, in which lie the remains of the poet 
Wolfe, author of "The Burial of Sir John More," 
is located about three-fourths of a mile from Queens- 
town on the inland slope of the ridge on which 

229 



JHE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" j 

Queenstown is built. A variety of religious cere- 
monies was in evidence at the burial, and the graves 
now constitute ground from which under certain su- 
perstitions the bodies can never be removed. Colo- 
nel Ducrot noted down, by means of the arbitrary 
numbers which had been assigned to them, the posi- 
tions of all the coffins as they were lowered into place ; 
and thus the relatives of subsequently identified dead 
are able to locate their bodies. 

By Monday evening the most exigent of our duties 
to the survivors and the American identified corpses 
had been partially disposed of, and we turned more 
to the task of insuring the recovery and identification 
of the largest possible number of bodies still missing. 
The descriptions of lost persons with which the Con- 
sulate had been deluged were accordingly sorted out 
and arranged in three lists, relating respectively to 
dead American male passengers, dead American fe- 
male passengers, and dead persons of other nationali- 
ties with regard to whom appeals had been made to 
us. These lists were first sent in typewritten carbon 
copies to the leading police and Coast Guard centers 
along the coast; and later were printed and scattered 
broadcast all along the shore villages from Youghal 
as far west and north as Sligo. Offers of rewards 
were included; and the hope was that bodies might 

230 



DEALING WITH THE DEAD 

be heard from which otherwise would have been re- 
garded as not worth reporting. 

In addition to these lists there were quite a few 
private handbills with descriptions and rewards as 
to specific missing individuals printed and circulated 
either with or without the cooperation of the Con- 
sulate. Fully a dozen such circulars must have re- 
lated to deceased Americans. Mr. "Walter Webb 
Ware, representing the Yanderbilt estate, spent a 
fortnight at Queenstown and along the southwestern 
coast ; and his painstaking management of the search 
for Mr. Vanderbilt's body was of general value to all 
the relatives interested in having the coast inhabit- 
ants aroused to the desirability of searching for and 
reporting corpses. Mr. Ware offered, through the 
Consulate, a reward of four hundred pounds for the 
recovery of Mr. Vanderbilt's remains, a sum equally 
as potent to the minds of the Kerry fishers as would 
have been four hundred thousand pounds. 

Beginning on Monday afternoon, the Cunard Com- 
pany spared nothing in its efforts to salve the dead 
bodies still floating on the scene of the sinking or 
washed ashore along the coasts. Captain Dodd, ma- 
rine superintendent of the Company, devoted his ex- 
perienced executive ability to organizing the search- 

231 



(THE CRIME OF THE **LUSITANIA» 

ing operations, and later gave the task over to a very 
capable supervisor in the person of Captain Manley. 
At times as many as six or eight specially-chartered 
tugs were engaged in the search, and every nook and 
cranny of the Irish shoreline for two hundred and 
fifty miles was gone over repeatedly. These oper- 
ations were not discontinued until June 5th, more 
than four weeks after the catastrophe. i 

Altogether it may fairly be said that the efforts 
for the recovery of bodies were as thorough and in- 
telligent as could have been humanly devised, and 
American relatives who have never received any news 
of their lost ones may rest assured that the bodies 
sank forever in deep water in the ocean or at least 
can never have reached the eye of man. 

About twenty American bodies were washed ashore 
at various times and places, and about one-half of 
these were reported to the Consulate by telegraph as 
a result of our circulars. Among these were the re- 
mains of Mr. Keser and his wife — found on strands 
at a distance of one hundred and twenty miles from 
one another; Mr. Shields, of Cincinnati, washed 
ashore at Castlegregory ; Herbert Stone, found near 
Ballybunion; and Captain Miller, of Erie, Pennsyl- 
vania, recovered in County Galway considerably 

232 



DEALING WITH THE DEAD 

more than two hundred miles from the scene of the 
foundering. The wide distribution of the dead 
bodies, both British and American, was due partly 
to the winds and partly to the Gulf Stream. The 
latter splits itself into two branches against the south- 
western corner of Ireland, one current traveling to- 
ward England along the southern coast and one going 
northward along the western coast. The Saturday 
and Sunday following the disaster were decidedly 
stormy, and the strong easterly winds coming from 
the direction of England scattered the body area and 
carried it westward as far as the corner of Ireland. 
There the northerly current took charge of the corpses 
and bore them up along the entire western coast 

In all cases where the bodies showed the slight- 
est indication of Americanism the local police tele- 
graphed to the Consulate at once ; but in several cases 
they also found it necessary to give the remains in- 
stant burial before awaiting instructions. After we 
had cabled to America we would then be forced to 
procure permission for the exhumation of these 
bodies to be shipped to America; and both the local 
councila and Dublin Castle had to be consulted for 
this permission. The Irish authorities were very 
accommodating in facilitating all such operations, 

233 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

and in making arrangements, through the Cunard 
Company, for turning over the effects found on 
American bodies to the Consulate. 

In fact no account of the Lusitania tragedy would 
be complete which neglected to pay an earnest tribute 
to the spirit in which the Irish people received it. 
The high efficiency and intelligence shown by the 
Koyal Irish Constabulary was indeed to have been 
expected, from the well-known reputation of that 
body; but in addition we found that the leaders of 
the Irish people showed nothing but sympathy for 
the victims and revulsion at the crime. For several 
years these people had been in bitter controversy 
with the Cunard Company over the latter's attitude 
toward the Queenstown calls of the Lusitania and 
Mauretania; yet on an instant's notice they sunk 
their feelings in a sound-hearted impulse toward 
helpfulness. Ireland's love of America and detesta- 
tion of Germany's atrocities received wonderful vin- 
dication. The verdict of the Kinsale coroner's jury 
that the Lusitania dead were "willfully murdered by 
the German Kaiser" was matched by more than a 
score of memorials and resolutions sent me by all the 
important local governmental bodies in the south of 
Ireland to be transmitted to President Wilson. 

234 



DEALING WITH THE DEAD 

The bodies washed ashore on the western coast of 
Ireland, curiously enough, appeared late in June and 
early in July, long after the searching operations 
had been discontinued. Apparently the corpses re- 
mained below the surface of the sea for several weeks, 
and only floated again in sporadic instances after 
decomposition had made considerable progress. More 
than nine hundred corpses, of course, were never re- 
covered at all. The bodies first recovered made a 
very strong appeal through their lifelikeness — a sort 
of unearthly aura of personality lent them by the 
rigor mortis. But this appeal was one to stimulate 
meditation and sentiment. The bodies recovered 
later on perhaps had a still more powerful effect upon 
the observer, because of their revolting condition; 
but in this case the reaction was emotional, almost 
physical. 

The rigidity relaxed into an inebriate flabbiness, 
and the features broke down into a preposterously 
animal-like repulsiveness. I was present as official 
witness to an autopsy performed on one body seventy- 
two days dead, but other corpses equaled it in the 
ravages they displayed. The faces registered every 
shading of the grotesque and hideous. The lips and 
noses were eaten away by sea-birds, and the eyes 
gouged out into staring pools of blood. It was al- 

235 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

most a relief when the faces became indistinguishable 
as such. Toward the last the flesh was wholly gone 
from the grinning skulls, the trunks were bloated 
and distended with gases, and the limbs were partially 
eaten away or bitten clean off by sea-creatures so that 
stumps of raw bone were left projecting. 

This was the final phase of the disaster as we saw 
it at Queenstown; and I have given it to you with- 
out mincing words because it seems a peculiarly ap- 
propriate termination for the Lusitania "incident." 
The picture of a proud ship on a sunny day in lovely 
waters, beautiful even in her death throes, is not 
what the word Lusitania calls up in my mind. I 
see, and every American ought to see, scores and hun- 
dreds of corpses of men and women and little folks — 
some rotting in pools of blood in unnamed deal cof- 
fins, some staring wearily up past me from the damp 
floor of the old Town Hall, and some lying with vile 
disfigurements in shreds of clothing soaking with the 
salt ocean. But always corpses. That is what the 
Lusitania means to me — corpses. God spare human- 
ity another Prussia ! 



CHAPTER VI 



WHY AMERICA FIGHTS 



The work of the Queenstown Consulate in con- 
nection with the loss of the Lusitania became, after 
the recovery of the last corpses early in July, merely 
a tedium of details — death certificates, custody and 
delivery of effects, sealing of coffins with the Con- 
sulate's seal, adjustment of freight charges and un- 
dertakers' charges, disinterment negotiations, and 
perpetually renewed assurance to bereaved Ameri- 
cans that there were no traces of their lost ones. 

Two principal exculpatory arguments have been 
put forward by the Germans for their act in destroy- 
ing without warning the innocent civilians who per- 
ished with the Lusitania. In the first place, they 
have had the effrontery to assert that the vessel was 
a ship of the British ITavy. That this is a rank dis- 
tortion and falsehood ought now to be too well known 
to bear repeating. The Lusitania, was merely a re- 
serve ship available for requisition, just as practi- 

237 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

cally every fast ship in the world is to-day formally 
or informally a reserve ship of the nation to which 
it belongs. To use a simple illustration, she was in 
a position identical with that of a militia reservist 
working on a railway in one of our eastern states 
who has not been called to the colors. So long as he 
remains in civil life he has the full immunities of 
a civilian, even although the railway which he serves 
should habitually transport a certain proportion of 
munitions among other commodities. Just so the 
Lusitania, as a vessel of the British naval reserve, 
could by no stretch of the imagination be deemed a 
ship of war so long as she was pursuing her ordinary 
activities modified only as the war had modified 
every commercial activity. 

This leads to the second German argument, that 
the part-cargo of munitions on the Lusitania made 
her a legitimate object of attack. The soundness of 
this plea depends upon what kind of attack is meant. 
"No principle of international law, or any other law, 
has ever made any ship a legitimate object of the 
kind of attack perpetrated upon the Lusitania. If 
she had been signaled by a surface cruiser, it is true, 
and her occupants had been summoned to abandon 
ship for a place of safety provided by the enemy, 
she might have been fair prize. Even if the sub- 

238 



WHY AMERICA FIGHTS 

marine had emerged and given warning, so that the 
Lusitania's commanders could have had the option of 
surrendering for the sake of the passengers, Ger- 
many might have had some technical, if smirchy, 
shreds of excuse. And if, upon such fair warning, 
the victim had chosen, and been able, to escape the 
Germans would have been in a discernibly stronger 
moral position to sink her without warning on some 
subsequent voyage. Conceding, for argument's sake, 
that the Germans believed their cause both fair and 
exigent, and that they lacked the means to attack the 
ship in full conformity with international usage, they 
might at least have done the utmost possible to 
regularize their conduct and render it correct; and 
had they done so the argument about the presence of 
absolute contraband on board the vessel would have 
retained some force. 

But the Germans have frequently served up this 
contraband argument in a different guise. The Al- 
lies are to all intents and purposes claiming, so Ber- 
lin expostulates, the right to introduce munitions 
into the British Isles ad libitum, free from subma- 
rine interference, by the mean expedient of covering 
them under passenger cabins, the passengers being 
used in just the way that "living screens" of civilians 

239 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

have been used by barbarians to cloak armed war- 
riors in battle. Now if the Lusitania case stood 
alone this argument would have some rationality; 
albeit its logical significance would be a strange one. 
It would mean that every ship which carries contra- 
band becomes ipso facto a combatant instead of a 
non-combatant, and may be attacked precisely as if 
it were an armed warship. Such a new departure 
in international law might conceivably be sponsored 
or supported on the ground that it would demark 
still more sharply than heretofore hostile operations 
from peaceful pursuits; and the world might some 
time come to agree that munitions of war should 
only be carried by ships of war — extreme, nay ab- 
surd, as such an arrangement under present condi- 
tions would be. 

Finally, if Germany had to feel herself constrained 
at all to adopt the horrible contention that a pas- 
senger ship becomes a lawful object of ruthless de- 
struction if it admits contraband in its cargo, she 
need not at all events have selected the very poorest 
medium of making her verbal announcement of the 
new policy and the very wickedest means of proving 
her earnestness about it. For instead of an honor- 
able — if the word were usable — diplomatic discus- 
sion by the usual channels, culminating in an open 

240 



WHY AMERICA FIGHTS 

and formal avowal of the weird new Supersittlich- 
Tceit, Germany shrank from giving any intimation of 
her determination except a shabby and undignified 
paid advertisement in the columns of a foreign press, 
a proceeding so preposterous that many of her well- 
wishers were in doubt whether it were not a hoax 
cooked up to throw her into ridicule. And for her 
practical proof of the implacability of her inten- 
tion to pursue the incredibly radical policy, instead 
of actually warning a few passenger ships, or instead 
even of torpedoing one or two comparatively small 
ships, Germany cold-bloodedly selected just that ves- 
sel which would involve the greatest number of pas- 
sengers, and struck it down without a semblance of 
real warning. She could easily have managed to 
have her abominable resolution believed in by one 
or two overt acts involving less than a tithe or hun- 
dredth of the loss of life caused by the Lusitania 
crime. 

Thus one by one the audacious pretenses by which 
Berlin has sought to cover the ugly nakedness of the 
crime fall away at contact with the most ordinary 
good-sense or decent thinking; and it becomes in- 
dubitable that actual and virulent malice and mur- 
der were in the hearts of the Prussians. As a minor 

241 



THE CRIME OF THE "LUSITANIA" 

factor I believe it to be true that a sordid jealousy 
of the great ship had been corroding the minds of 
German shipping magnates since the day she was 
built, and that their desire to "get" her had been 
woven by them into the Kaiser's war plans for many 
years. But far more important was the general Ger- 
man will to power at any cost; the insane ambition 
to smite down and exult over their adversaries; the 
disease-perverted dreams of proving a transcendent 
disdain of the slave-morality of their western neigh- 
bors; the lust to seal and certify their abysmal con- 
tempt and hatred of anything and everything except 
the Germans' destiny. 

It is just this element of incomparable spiritual 
turpitude which gives to the torpedoing of the Lusi- 
tania its awful preeminence among the world's trag- 
edies. Property of price and lives beyond price have 
been destroyed in other events, not only by acts of 
God but by the wretched iniquity of man ; but never 
before has that iniquity been so inordinate. Such 
occurrences as the Halifax explosion and the Guate- 
malan earthquakes are of course wholly devoid of 
the moral element; but even in the Armenian mas- 
sacres and similar modern and ancient crimes of de- 
pressing moral culpability there has never been ap- 
proximated the intensity of spiritual sin which we 

242 



WHY AMERICA FIGHTS 

cannot but recognize in the Lusitania horror. For 
the latter's perpetrators have not one of the mitigat- 
ing excuses — the savage blood, the ignorance, the re- 
ligious superstition — which have extenuated the 
crimes of Turk and Templar. The Prussians pre- 
sent the evil prodigy of men of enlightenment, prog- 
ress and fine idealism prepensedly violating their con- 
sciences and hardening their hearts into a fierce and 
cold repudiation of all the principles they had them- 
selves helped to erect toward the dignifying and vin- 
dicating of the existence of mankind. 

During centuries men have been struggling, and 
every man knows how weakly and haltingly, to yield 
ever a little more and a little more heed and adher- 
ence to certain fugitive visions and intuitions which 
keep mercifully revisiting mortal hearts. We have 
striven to work the ape and tiger out, somewhat; to 
stumble a little higher and not slip back. We have 
ventured to formulate what we allude to as princi- 
ples, and have tried as best we might to enshrine 
them, and to be. loyal to whatever powers there be 
which they represent. And it was at the precarious 
net result of achievement in this direction, the rarest 
and fragilest heritage produced and passed on in 
human evolution, that the Germans struck with 
deadly guilt in striking at the Lusitania. 

243 



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